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THE AMERICAN SPORTSMAN'S LIBRARY 

EDITED BY 
CASPAR WHITNEY 



MUSK-OX, BISON, SHEEP 
AND GOAT 



■j^y^o- 




'/ 



MUSK-OX. BISON. SHEEP 
AND GOAT 

BY 

CASPAR WHITNEY 
GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL 

AND 

OWEN WISTER 




THE MACMILLAN COMPANY' 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1904 

AU r^his reserved 



^v^^'"^ 

^i^- 



UBRARr of CONGRESS 
Twe Cvpies Reeeivtid 

MAR t 1904 

Copyright Etntry 

Class '^ xxo. No. 

*-: 1 3 

COPY B 



Copyright, 1904, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY, 



Set up, electrotyped, and published February, 1904. 



Norwood Press 

J. 5. Gushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Ct. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.^. 



MUSK-OX, BISON, SHEEP 
AND GOAT 



CONTENTS 

THE MUSK-OX 
By Caspar Whitney 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. My First Kill 17 

II. The Provision Question 32 

III. Seasons and Equipment 44 

IV. Method of Hunting 56 

V. The Musk-ox 70 

THE BISON. By George Bird Grinnell . . 107 

THE MOUNTAIN SHEEP: HIS WAYS. By Owen 

Wister 167 

THE WHITE GOAT AND HIS WAYS. By Owen 

Wister 227 

INDEX 277 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



The Beginning of the Slaughter 



Frontispiece 



PAGE 
15 



In the Far North .... 

At Bay 30 

Outnumbered 45 

East Greenland Musk-ox Calf 57 

Head of Two-year-old Musk-ox Bull .... 57 
Musk-oxen on Cape Morris Jesup, brought to Bay 

BY Dogs 65 

The Author's Barren Ground Hunting Knife and Ax 67 

The Barren Ground Musk-ox — a Full-grown Bull . 71 

Forefoot of Barren Ground Musk-ox .... 76 

Full-grown East Greenland Musk-ox — Adult Male 77 

Forefoot of East Greenland Musk-ox .... 79 

Skull of the East Greenland Musk-ox — Front View 82 

Skull of the Barren Ground Musk-ox — Front View 82 

Skull of the East Greenland Musk-ox — Side View . 83 

Skull of the Barren Ground Musk-ox — Side View . 83 

Male Yearling of the East Greenland Musk-ox . 87 

Adult Female of the East Greenland Musk-ox . 95 

Musk-ox Calf loi 

The Last of the Herd 109 

II 



12 



Illustrations 



Protected . 

Rocky Mountain Sheep 

Alert .... 

Under a Hot Sky 

Surprised 

The Saddleback Sheep 

Above Timber Line . 

The White Goat is an Agile Climber 



139 
169 
177 
187^ 

201 
213 
229 
253 



THE MUSK-OX AND ITS HUNTING 

By Caspar Whitney 




IN THE FAR NORTH 



MUSK-OX, BISON, SHEEP, AND 
GOAT 

THE MUSK-OX 

I 

My First Kill 

We had passed through the " Land of Little 
Sticks," as the Indians so appropriately call that 
desolate waste which connects the edge of tim- 
ber land with the Barren Grounds, and had been 
for several days making our way north on the 
lookout for any living thing that would provide 
us with a mouthful of food. 

We had got into one of those pieces of this 
great barren area, which, broken by rocky ridges, 
of no great height but of frequent occurrence, 
are unspeakably harassing to the travelling snow- 
shoer. It was the third twelve hours of our fast, 
save for tea and the pipe, and all day we had 
been dragging ourselves wearily up one ridge 
and down another in the ever recurring and 

17 



1 8 The Musk-ox 

always disappointed hope that on each we should 
sight caribou or musk-oxen. The Indians were 
discouraged and sullen, as they usually did become 
on such occasions; and this troubled me really 
more than not finding food, for I was in con- 
stant dread of their growing disheartened and 
turning back to the woods. That was the possi- 
bility which, since the very starting day, had at 
all times and most seriously menaced the success 
of my venture ; because we were pushing on in 
the early part of March, at a time when the 
storms are at their greatest severity, and when 
none had ever before ventured into the Barren 
Grounds. Therefore, in my fear lest the Indians 
turn back, I sought to make light of our diffi- 
culties by breaking into song when we stopped 
to " spell "^ our dogs, hoping by my assumed light- 
heartedness to shame the Indians out of showing 
their desire to turn homeward. 

How much I felt like singing may be imagined. 

So the day dragged on without sight of a mov- 
ing creature, not even a fox, and it was past noon 
when we laboriously worked our way up one par- 
ticular ridge which seemed to have an unusual 
amount of unnecessary and ragged rock strewn 

1 Rest. 



My First Kill 19 

over its surface. I remember we scarcely ven- 
tured to look into the white silent country that 
stretched in front of us; disappointment had 
rewarded our long searchings so often that we 
had somehow come to accept it as a matter 
of course. Squatting down back of the sledge in 
shelter from the wind seemed of more imme- 
diate concern than looking ahead for meat: at 
least we were sure of the solace our pipes gave. 
Thus we smoked in silence, with no sign of inter- 
est in what the immediate country ahead might 
hold for us, until Beniah, the leader of my Indians, 
and an unusually good one, started to his feet 
with an exclamation and, hurriedly climbing on 
top a good-sized rock, stretched his arm ahead, 
obviously much stirred with excitement. He 
shouted, once and loud, " e^/ian,'' ^ and then con- 
tinued mumbling it as though to make his tongue 
sure of what his eyes beheld. We all gathered 
around him, climbing his rock or on other ones, 
in desperate earnestness to see what he saw in the 
direction he continued pointing. It was minutes 
before I could discern anything having life in the 
distance which reached away to the horizon all 
white and silent, and then I detected a kind of 

^ Caribou. 



20 The Musk-ox 

vapor arising apparently from some dark objects 
blurringly outlined against the snow about four 
miles away ; it was the mist which arises from a 
herd of animals where the mercury is ranging 
between sixty and seventy degrees below zero, 
and on a clear day may be seen five miles away. 
Thoroughly aroused now, I got my field-glasses 
from my sledge and searched the dark objects 
under the mist. They were not caribou, of that 
I was certain ; as to what they were I was equally 
uncertain, for the forms were strange to my eye. 
So I handed the glasses to Beniah, saying, " etkan 
illa!^'^ Beniah took the glasses, but as it was 
the first time he had ever looked through a pair, 
their range and power seemed to excite him quite 
as much as did the appearance of the game itself. 
When he did find his tongue, he fairly shouted, 
" ejerrir ^ I had no accurate knowledge of what 
^^ ej'erri'' meant, but assumed we had sighted 
musk-oxen. Instantly all was excitement. The 
Indians set up a yell and rushed for their sledges, 
jabbering and laughing. It seemed incredible 
that these were the same men who so shortly 
before had sat silent with backs to the wind, 
dejected and indifferent. 

^ Not caribou. ^ Musk-ox. 



My First Kill 21 

Every one now busied himself turning loose his 
dogs, — a small matter for the Indians, with their 
simply sewn harness from which the dogs were 
easily slipped, but a rather complex job for me. 
My dog train had come from the Post, and its har- 
ness was made of buckles and straps and things 
not easily undone in freezing weather ; so it hap- 
pened that by the time my dogs were unhitched, 
the Indians and all their dogs were fully quarter of 
a mile nearer the musk-oxen than I and running 
for very dear life. My preconceived notions of 
the musk-ox hunting game were in a jiffy jolted 
to the point of destruction, as I now found 
myself in a situation neither expected nor joyful. 
It was natural to suppose some assistance would 
be given me in this strange environment, and 
that the consideration of a party of my own 
organizing and my own paying should be my 
killing the musk-ox for which I had come 
so long a distance. But we were a long way 
from the Post and interpreters and restraining 
influences ; and at this moment of readjustment 
I speedily realized that it was to be a survival 
of the fittest on this expedition, and if I got a 
musk-ox it would be of my own getting. It 
comforted me to know that, even though some- 



22 The Musk-ox 

what tucked up as to stomach, due to three days' 
hard travel on only tea, I was in fine physical con- 
dition, and up to making the effort of my life. 

By the time I had run about two miles I had 
caught the last of the Indians, who were stretched 
out in a long column, with two leading by half a 
mile. Within another mile I had passed all the 
stragglers, and was running practically even with 
the second Indian, who was two or three hun- 
dred yards behind the leading one. This Indian, 
Seco by name, was one of the best snow-shoe 
runners I ever encountered. He gave evidence 
of his endurance and speed on many another 
occasion than this one, for always there was a run 
of four miles or more after every musk-ox herd 
we sighted, and invariably a foot-race between 
Seco and me preceded final leadership. I may 
add incidentally that he always beat me, although 
we made some close finishes during the fifty- 
seven days we roamed this God-forgotten bit of 
the earth. 

On this particular day, though I passed the 
second Indian, Seco kept well in the lead, with 
practically all the dogs just ahead of him. It 
was the roughest going I had ever experienced, 
for the course lay over a succession of low but 



Afp First Kill 23 

sharp, rocky ridges covered with about a foot of 
snow, and, on the narrow tripping shoes used in 
the Barren Grounds, I broke through the crust 
where it was soft, or jammed my shoes between 
the wind-swept rocks that lay close together, or 
caught in those I attempted to clear in my 
stride. It was a species of hurdle racing to test 
the bottom of a well-fed, conditioned athlete ; 
how it wore on a tea diet I need not say. 

After we had been running for about an hour, 
it seemed to me as though we should never see 
the musk-oxen. Ridge after ridge we crossed 
and yet not a sight of the coveted quarry. Seco 
still held a lead of about one hundred yards, and 
I remember I wondered in my growing fatigue 
why on earth that Indian maintained such a pace, 
for I could not help feeling that when the musk- 
oxen finally had been caught up, he would stop 
until I, and all the Indians and all the dogs had 
come up, so as to more certainly assure the suc- 
cess of the hunt : but it was not the first time I 
had been with Indian hunters, and I knew well 
enough not to take any chances. 

In another half hour's running, as I worked up 
the near side of a rather higher and broader 
ridge than any we had crossed, I heard the 



24 The Musk-ox 

dogs barking, and speeding to the top, what was 
my disappointment, not to say distress, at behold- 
ing twenty-five to thirty musk-oxen just startled 
into running along a ridge about a quarter of a 
mile beyond Seco, who, with his dogs, was in 
full chase after them about fifty yards ahead of 
me. What I thought at that time of the North- 
land Indian hunting methods, and of Seco and 
all my other Indians in particular, did the situ- 
ation and my condition of mind scant justice 
then — ^and would not make goodly reading here. 
Had I been on an ordinary hunting expedition, 
disgust with the whole fool business would, I 
doubt not, have been paramount, but the thought 
of the distance I had come and the privations 
undergone for no other reason than to get a 
musk-ox, made me the more determined to suc- 
ceed despite obstacles of any and all kinds. So I 
went on. The wind was blowing a gale from the 
south when I reached the top of the ridge along 
which I had seen the musk-oxen run, and the 
main herd had disappeared over the northern end 
of it, and were a mile away to the north, travelling 
with heads carried well out, though not lowered, 
at an astonishing pace and ease over the rocks. 
Four had separated from the main body and were 



My First Kill 25 

going almost due east on the south side of the 
ridge. I determined to stalk these four, because 
I could keep the north side of the ridge, out of 
sight, and to leeward, feeling certain they would 
sooner or later turn north to rejoin the main 
herd. It seemed my best chance. I perfectly 
realized the risk I ran in separating from the 
Indians; but at that moment nothing appeared 
so important as getting a musk-ox, for which I 
had now travelled nearly twelve hundred miles 
on snow-shoes. 

I have done a deal of hunting in my life, over 
widely separated and trackless sections, and had 
my full share of hard trips; but never shall I 
forget the run along that ridge. It called for 
more heart and more strength than any situation 
I ever faced. Already I had run, I suppose, about 
five miles when I started after those four musk- 
oxen ; and when the first enthusiasm had passed, 
it seemed as though I must give it up. Such 
fatigue I had never dreamed of. I have no idea 
how much farther I ran, — three or four more 
miles, likely, — but I do remember that after a 
time the fancy possessed me that those four 
musk-oxen and I were alone on earth, that they 
knew I was after their heads, and were luring me 



26 The Mtisk-ox 

deep into a strange land to lose me ; thus in the 
great silent land we raced grimly, with death 
trailing the steps of each. The dead-white sur- 
face reaching out before me without ending 
seemed to rise and to fall as though I travelled a 
rocking ship ; and the snow and the rocks danced 
around my whirling head in a grinning, glisten- 
ing maze. When I fell, which frequently I did, 
it seemed such a long time before I again stood 
on my feet ; and what I saw appeared as though 
seen through the small end of field-glasses. 

I was in a dripping perspiration and had 
dropped my fur capote and cartridge-belt after 
thrusting half a dozen shells into my pocket. 
On and on I ran, wondering in a semi-dazed 
way if the musk-oxen were really on the other 
side of the ridge. Finally the ridge took a sharp 
turn to the north, and as I reached the top of it, 
there — about one hundred yards ahead — were 
two of the musk-oxen running slowly but directly 
from me. Instantly the blood coursed through 
my veins and the mist cleared from my eyes ; 
dropping on one knee I swung my rifle into posi- 
tion, but my hand was so tremulous and my heart 
thumped so heavily that the front sight wobbled 
all over the horizon. I realized that this might 



Afy First Kill 27 

be the only shot I should get, — for Indians had 
gone into the Barren Grounds in more propitious 
seasons, and not seen even one herd, — yet with 
the musk-oxen going away from me all the while, 
every instant of time seemed an insuperable age. 
The agony of those few seconds I waited so as to 
steady my hand ! Once or twice I made another 
attempt to aim, but still the hand was too uncer- 
tain, I did not dare risk a shot. When I had 
rested a minute or two, that seemed fully half an 
hour, — at last the fore sight held true for an in- 
stant ; and I pressed the trigger. 

The exultation of that moment when I saw 
one of the two musk-oxen stagger, and then fall, 
I know I shall never again experience. 

The report of my rifle startled the other musk- 
ox into a wild gallop over a ridge, and I followed 
as rapidly as I could, so soon as I made sure that 
the other was really down. As I went over the 
ridge I caught sight of the remaining musk-ox, 
and shot simultaneously with two reports on my 
left, which I later discovered to have come from 
the second Indian whom I had passed in closing 
upon Seco on the run to the first view of the 
musk-oxen, and who now hove in sight with one 
dog, as the second musk-ox dropped. 



28 The Musk-ox 

I found on returning to my kill that it was a 
cow, needless to say a sore disappointment ; and 
so, although pretty well tuckered out, I again 
started to the north in the hope that I might 
get wind of the other two of the four after which 
I had originally started, or find tracks of strag- 
glers from the main herd. Several miles I went 
on, but finding no tracks, and darkness coming 
down, I turned to make my way back, knowing 
that the Indians would follow up and camp by 
the slain musk-oxen for the night. But as I 
journeyed I suddenly realized that, except for 
going in a southerly direction, I really had no 
definite idea of the exact direction in which I 
was travelling, and with night setting in and a 
chilling wind blowing I knew that to lose my- 
self might easily mean death. So I turned about 
on my tracks and followed them back first to 
where I had turned south, and thence on my 
back tracks to where the musk-ox lay. It was a 
long and puzzling task, for the wind had always 
partly, and for distances entirely, obliterated the 
earlier marks of my snow-shoes. 

Nine o'clock came before I finally reached 
the place where the dead quarry lay; and there 
I found the Indians gnawing on raw and half- 




AT BAY 



Afy First Kill 3^ 

frozen musk-ox fat. Seco, badly frozen and hardly 
able to crawl from fatigue, did not turn up until 
midnight; and it was not until he arrived that 
we lighted our little fire of sticks and had our 
tea. 

Then in a sixty-seven degrees below zero tem- 
perature we rolled up in our furs, while the dogs 
howled and fought over the carcass of my first 
musk-ox. 



II 

The Provision Question 

Except in the summer, when the caribou are 
running in vast herds, venture into the Barren 
Grounds entails a struggle with both cold and 
hunger. It is either a feast or a famine; more 
frequently the latter than the former. So there 
was nothing extraordinary in being upon our 
third day without food at the first musk-ox killing 
to which I have referred. Yet the lack of nour- 
ishment was not perhaps as trying as the wind, 
which seemed to sweep directly from the frozen 
seas, so strong that we had to bend low in 
pushing forward against it, and so bitter as to 
cut our faces cruelly. Throughout my journey 
into this silent land of the lone North the wind 
caused me more real suffering than the semi- 
starvation state in which we were more or less 
continuously. Indeed, for the first few weeks I 
had utmost difficulty in travelling; the wind ap- 
peared to take the very breath out of my body 

32 



The Provision Qiiestioti 3Z 

and the activity out of my muscles. I was physi- 
cally in magnificent shape, for I had spent a 
couple of weeks at Fort Resolution, on Great 
Slave Lake, and what with plenty of caribou 
meat and a daily run of from ten to twenty miles 
on snow-shoes by way of keeping in training, I 
was about as fit as I have been at any time in 
my life. Therefore the severe struggle with the 
wind impressed me the more. But the novelty 
wore off in a couple of weeks, and though the 
conditions were always trying, they became more 
endurable as I grew accustomed to the daily 
combat. 

One of the first lessons I learned was to keep 
my face free from covering, and also as clean 
shaven as was possible under such circumstances. 
It makes me smile now to remember the elaborate 
hood arrangement which was knitted for me in 
Canada, and that then seemed to me one of 
the most important articles of my equipment. 
It covered the entire head, ears, and neck, with 
openings only for eyes and mouth, and in 
town I had viewed it as a great find ; but I 
threw it away before I got within a thousand 
miles of the Barren Grounds. The reason is 
obvious : my breath turned the front of the hood 



34 The Musk-ox 

into a sheet of ice before I had run three miles; 
and as there was no fire in the Barren Grounds to 
thaw it, of course it was an impossible thing to 
wear in that region and a poor thing in any 
region of low temperature. After other experi- 
ments, I found the simplest and most comfortable 
head-gear to be my own long hair, which hung 
even with my jaw, bound about just above the 
ears by a handkerchief, and the open hood of 
my caribou-skin capote drawn forward over all. 
I learned a great many things about hunting 
the musk-ox on this first effort, and not the 
least memorable was the lesson of how very 
difficult an animal it is to score on without the 
aid of a dog. This is solely due to the lie of 
the land. The physical character of the Barren 
Grounds is of the rolling or prairie type. Stand- 
ing on the first elevation after passing beyond 
the last timber, you look north across a great 
expanse of desert, apparently flat country dotted 
with lakes innumerable, and broken here and 
there by rock-topped ridges. When you get 
actually into the country, you find these ridges, 
though not high, are yet higher than they look 
to be, and the travelling in general very rough. 
In summer there is no travel over the Barren 



The Provision Qiiestion 3s 

Grounds, except by canoe; for barring the gener- 
ous deposit of broken rock, it is practically a vast 
swamp. In the winter, of course, this is frozen 
over and topped by a foot or a foot and a half of 
snow. It was a surprise to find no greater depth 
of snow, but the fall is light in the very far North, 
and the continuous gales pack and blow it so that 
what remains on the ground is firm as earth. For 
that reason the snow-shoes used in the Barren 
Grounds are of the smallest pattern used any- 
where. They are from six to eight inches wide, 
three feet long, and, because of the dry char- 
acter of the snow, have rather closer lacing than 
any other shoe. This is the shoe used also 
throughout the Athabasca-Slave-Mackenzie River 
sections. The snow nowhere along this line of 
travel is over a couple of feet in depth, is light 
and dry and the "tripping" shoe, so called, is the 
very best possible for such kind of going. In 
the spring, when the snow is a little heavier, 
the lacing is more open, otherwise the shoe is 
unchanged. 

It is well known, I suppose, that the Barren 
Grounds are devoid absolutely not only of trees but 
even of brush, except for some scattered, stunted 
bushes that in summer are to be found in occa- 



26 The Miisk-ox 

sional spots at the water's edge, but may not be 
depended upon for fuel. From Great Slave Lake 
north to the timber's edge is about three hundred 
miles; beyond that is a stretch of country per- 
haps of another hundred miles, suggestively 
called the Land of Little Sticks by the Indians, 
over which are scattered and widely separated 
little patches of small pine, sometimes of an acre 
in extent, sometimes a little less and sometimes a 
little more. They seem to be a chain of wooded 
islands in this desert that connect the main tim- 
ber line (which, by the way, does not end abruptly, 
but straggles out for many miles, growing thinner 
and thinner until it ends, and the Land of Little 
Sticks begins) with the last free growth; and I 
never found them nearer together than a good 
day's journey. About three or four days' travel 
takes you through this Land of Little Sticks and 
brings you to the last wood. The last wood that 
I found was a patch of about four or five acres 
with trees two or three inches in diameter at their 
largest, although one or two isolated ones were 
perhaps as large as five or six inches. Here you 
take the fire-wood for your trip into the Barrens. 
I have been often asked why the periods of 
starvation experienced in musk-ox hunting could 



The Provision Question 37 

not be obviated by carrying food. I have been 
asked, in a word, why I did not haul supplies. 
The patent answer is that, in the first place, I 
had none to take ; and that, in the second place, 
if I had had a car-load at Great Slave Lake to 
draw upon, I would have been unable to carry 
provisions with me into the Barren Grounds. It 
is to be remembered that Great Slave Lake, 
where I outfitted for the Barren Grounds, is nine 
hundred miles from the railroad, that every 
pound of provision is freighted by water usually, 
or by dog sledge on emergency. The Hudson's 
Bay Company's posts, beginning at Athabasca 
Landing, are located along the great waterways 
— Athabasca, Slave, Mackenzie rivers — about 
every two hundred miles. These are small trad- 
ing posts, having powder and ball, and things to 
wear, and of ornament, rather than things to eat. 
Provisions are taken in, but to a limited extent, 
and there is never a winter which does not see 
the end of the company's supplies before the ice 
breaks up and the first boat of the year arrives. 
There is never a plenty even for the usual de- 
mand, and an unusual demand, if it is to be met, 
means a trimming all round. In snow-shoeing 
from the railroad to Great Slave Lake I secured 



38 The Musk-ox 

fresh sledge-dogs and men and provisions at every 
post, which carried me to the next post north, 
whence men and dogs returned to their own 
post, while I continued north with a new supply. 
Although there was comparative plenty at the 
time of my trip, so carefully are the stores 
husbanded that I never could get supplies more 
than just enough to carry me to the next post; 
and these were invariably skimped, so that for a 
five days' journey I habitually started with about 
four days' supplies. 

Thus it is easy to see why there were no pro- 
visions at Great Slave Lake for me to draw on ; 
and, as I have said, had there been an abundance, 
it would have been impossible for me to carry 
them (and would be equally so for any one else 
venturing into the Barren Grounds at the same 
season of the year) simply for lack of transpor- 
tation, which, after all, is the great problem of 
this North Country. One would think that in a 
land where the only means of travel for most 
of the year, where almost the very existence of 
the people depends so largely on sledge-dogs, 
there would be an abundance of them and of the 
best breed; yet the truth is that sledge-dogs of 
any kind are scarce even on the river thorough- 



The Provision Qtiestion 39 

fares. At the company's posts there is not more 
than one, or at the most two, spare trains ; among 
the Indians, upon whom, of course, I had to rely 
when I outfitted for the Barren Grounds, dogs 
are even scarcer. Fort Resolution is one of the 
most important posts of the Hudson's Bay Com- 
pany in all that great country, and yet the 
settlement itself is very small, numbering per- 
haps fifty; the Indians — Dog Ribs and Yellow 
Knives — living in the woods from six to ten 
days' travel from the post. I found it not only 
extremely difficult to get Indians to go with me, 
but secured seven dog teams only after widest 
search. This reads strange, I am sure, yet it was 
all but impossible for me to secure the number 
of dogs and sledges required for my trip. 

But, some of my friends have asked, with seven 
sledges and twenty-eight dogs, surely there was 
room to carry enough provision to insure against 
starvation in the Barren Grounds? Not at all. 
There was not room to carry more than tea, 
tobacco, our sleeping-furs, and moccasins and 
duffel socks. Moccasins and duffel and tobacco 
and tea are the highly essential articles in the 
Barren Ground outfit. The duffel is a light kind 
of blanket which is made into leggings and also 



40 The Mtisk-ox 

into socks. You wear three pairs inside your 
moccasins, and at night, if you have been well 
advised, you put next to your feet a slipper mocca- 
sin of the unborn musk-ox, hair inside. It must 
be remembered that in the Barren Grounds you 
have no fire to thaw out or dry frozen and wet 
clothing. The tiny fire you do have is only 
enough to make tea. Therefore abundant duffel 
and moccasins are necessary, first, to have a dry, 
fresh change, and second, to replenish them as 
they wear out, as they do more than elsewhere, 
because of the rocky going. As for tea and to- 
bacco, no human being could stand the cold 
and the hardship of a winter Barren Ground trip 
without putting something hot into his stomach 
every day, while the tobacco is at once a stimu- 
lant and a solace. The space left on the sledge 
after the tea and tobacco and moccasins and 
duffel have been stowed must be filled with the 
sticks that you cut into pieces (just the width of 
the sledge) at the last wood on the edge of the 
Barren Grounds proper. The sledge is a toboggan 
about nine feet in length and a foot and a half in 
width, made of two or three birch slats held to- 
gether by crosspieces lashed on to them with 
caribou thongs, turned over and back at the front 



The Provision Qiiestion 41 

into a dasher, which is covered by a caribou apron 
(sometimes decorated in crude painting), and held 
in its curved position by strings of babiche, — as 
the thongs of caribou skin are called, — the same 
material which furnishes the snow-shoe lacing. 
On this sledge is fitted a caribou-skin body, 
about seven feet in length, the full width of the 
sledge, and a foot and a half deep. Into this is 
stowed the load. Then the top sides are drawn 
together, and the whole lashed firmly to the 
sledge by side lines. This must be done with 
the care and security bestowed upon the dia- 
mond hitch used on pack-animals ; for the 
sledge in the course of a day's travel is roughly 
knocked about. 

It requires no further explanation, I fancy, to 
show why it is not possible to carry provisions. 

One of my friends on my return from this trip 
suggested the possibility of shipping dogs into 
the country; of doing, in a word, somewhat as 
do the pole-hunting expeditions. That might be 
possible to a wealthy adventurer, but, even so, I 
should consider it an experiment of very doubt- 
ful results, simply because of the impossibility of 
feeding the dogs after they had arrived in the 
country, or of providing for them after you had 



42 The Musk-ox 

started into the Barren Grounds. There is a 
period in the summer at Great Slave Lake when 
any number of dogs could be sufficiently fed on 
the quantities of fish that are then to be caught 
in the lake ; and no doubt enough fish could be 
stored to feed them in the season when the lakes 
are frozen, if the dogs remained at the post. Even 
so, that would keep busy a number of especially 
engaged fishermen. But when you started for 
the Barren Grounds with all these dogs, your 
feeding problem would be an overwhelming one 
indeed, for only in the midsummer, when the 
caribou are to be found in large herds, would it 
be possible to kill meat for a great many dogs ; 
and in midsummer you would not, could not, 
use dogs at all ; at that season the Barren 
Grounds are invaded by means of the chain of 
lakes and short portages which begin at the 
northeastern end of the Great Slave Lake. 
Even travelling along the river the question of 
dog feed is a serious one, and you are obliged to 
carry the fish which have been caught the pre- 
vious summer and stored at the posts in great 
frozen heaps. It is obvious, therefore, that there 
is no easy or comfortable way of getting into 
the Barren Grounds. It would be impracticable 



The Provision Question 43 

to do other than rely on the resources at hand 
and go into the silent land just as do the Indians. 
It is simply impracticable to do other than to 
depend on the caribou and the musk-oxen for 
food for both men and dogs. 



Ill 

Seasons and Equipment 

Midsummer is the season when the hunter 
may visit the Barren Grounds with the least dis- 
comfort and least danger, for at this time you go 
by canoe. The caribou are plentiful and the 
thermometer rarely goes below freezing-point. 
But even then trials are many, and there is con- 
siderable danger of starvation. The mosquitoes 
are a pest almost beyond endurance, and the 
caribou, although abundant, are down toward the 
Arctic and of very uncertain movement. Their 
course of migration one year may be fifty to one 
hundred miles east or west of where it was the 
preceding year. In the 350,000 square miles of 
the Barren Grounds one may easily go days 
without finding caribou even at such a time of 
plenty ; and not to find them might easily mean 
starvation. 

The most extensive trips into the Barren 
Grounds for musk-oxen previous to my venture 

44 




OUTNUMBERED 



Seasons and Equipment /\ri 

had been made by two Englishmen, Warburton 
Pike and Henry Toke Munn. Mr. Pike (a hunter 
of experience whose book, "Barren Ground of 
Northern Canada," published in 1892, still stands 
as one of the most interesting and faithful con- 
tributions to the literature of sport and adven- 
ture) spent the better part of two years in this 
country, and made several summer and autumn 
trips into the Barren Grounds. He made one 
summer trip solely for the purpose of killing and 
cacheing caribou, which he might draw upon in 
the next autumn musk-ox hunt when the caribou 
were scarce. Yet, notwithstanding all this prepa- 
ration, he had a very hard time of it in the autumn 
hunt and was unable to accomplish all that he 
set out to do. He did get, however, the musk-ox 
he went after. On Munn's autumn trip, although 
there were yet to be had some fish in the lakes, 
he and his party and their dogs had a starving 
time of it indeed. I particularize these two trips 
to instance the difficulties of hunting in the 
Barren Grounds, even when the conditions are 
the most favorable that may be had. 

The Indians time their hunting trips into the 
Barren Grounds by the movement of the caribou, — 
in the early summer, about May, when the caribou 



48 The Musk-ox 

begin their migration from the woods down to 
the Arctic Ocean ; and in the early autumn when 
the caribou are fairly well distributed and are 
working back toward the wood again. Caribou 
are absolutely essential to penetration of the 
Barren Grounds, because from the woods to 
where musk-oxen are found is a considerable dis- 
tance, and no possible meat except that supplied 
by these members of the deer family. Nor is a 
trip into the Barren Grounds always rewarded 
wdth musk-oxen. Many Indian parties have gone 
in and failed to see even a track, and many others 
have skirmished along the edge, dreading to 
plunge into the interior, and hopeful perhaps of 
a stray ox. The Indians, who do not now hunt 
musk-oxen as much as formerly owing to the les- 
sened demand for the pelt, usually go in parties 
of four to six ; never less than four, because they 
would be unable to carry a wood supply adequate 
to getting far enough into the Barren Grounds for 
reasonable hope of securing the game ; and rarely 
more than six, because when they have got as far 
into the country as six sledges of wood will per- 
mit, they have either got what they want, or 
they have had enough of freezing and starving 
to impel a start homeward. Only the hardiest 



Seasons and Equipment 49 

make the trip ; to be a musk-ox hunter and an 
enduring snow-shoe runner, is the dearest ambi- 
tion of and the greatest height to which the Far 
Northland Indian can attain. 

Before I started on my trip I heard much of 
pemmican, and fancied it procurable at almost 
any northern post, as well as supposing it a 
reliable source of provender. The truth is, how- 
ever, that pemmican is a very rare article these 
days in that section of the country, and in fact 
is not to be found anywhere south of Great 
Slave Lake, and only there on occasion. This 
is largely because the caribou are not so numer- 
ous as formerly, and the Indians prefer to keep 
the grease for home consumption, when at ease 
in their autumn camps. Even among the Indians 
around Great Slave Lake pemmican is used but 
very little in the ordinary tripping (travelling)* 
It has been substituted by pounded caribou 
meat, which is carried in little caribou-skin bags 
and eaten with grease. One can never get too 
much of grease in the Northland, where it is 
eaten as some consume sugar in the civilized 
world. And this is to be accounted for by the 
burning up of the tissues in cold dry climate 
and the absence of bread and vegetables ; for 



50 The Miisk-ox 

meat and tea are the sole articles of food. 
Coffee, by the way, is a luxury to be found only 
occasionally on the table of a Hudson's Bay Com- 
pany post factor. 

There is so much to be told, if one is to 
give an adequate idea of what hunting the musk- 
ox implies, that I find it somewhat difficult, 
without going to considerable length, to cover the 
entire field. I suppose it is because the musk-ox 
is the most inaccessible animal in the whole wide 
world, that there is so much curiosity concerning 
the conditions of hunting it, and so much interest 
in the recital of one's experience. From time to 
time a great many letters come to me filled with 
questions, and I am and shall always be happy 
to add in personal letters any data I may have 
overlooked here. I am trying, however, to make 
this chapter thoroughly practical and intelligible 
to those with any thought of ever seeking the 
musk-ox in this region. The easiest way, as I 
have said, is to go by Hudson's Bay Trading 
boat, which leaves Athabasca Landing as soon 
as the ice breaks, down to Resolution. If you 
have arranged beforehand by letter with the 
factor at Resolution, you will arrive there in 
time to make a summer hunt into the Barren 



Seasons and Equipment 51 

Grounds, which is reached, as I have shown, by 
means of short portages and a chain of lakes, 
starting from the northeast corner of Great Slave 
Lake, and following Lockhart's River. If you 
are not delayed and do not get too far into the 
Barren Grounds, you would stand a chance of get- 
ting out and back to Athabasca Landing on the 
water ; but everything would have to go your 
way and the trip be most expeditious in order 
to do this. If you were not out in time to go 
by open water, it would necessitate a nine hun- 
dred mile snow-shoe trip, or laying over until the 
following spring when the ice broke up again. 
The Canadian government has protected musk- 
oxen for several years, and in order to hunt, one 
must be provided with a special permit from that 
government. The protection of the musk-ox 
seems scarcely necessary, for although the polar 
expeditions have slaughtered a great many on 
Greenland and on the Arctic islands, the killing 
of them in the Barren Grounds proper never has 
been, and never will be, sufficiently large to give 
concern to the Canadian government. The musk- 
ox is of a genus that seems to be a declining type 
among the world's animals, but if extinction 
comes to those in the Barren Grounds, it cer- 



52 The Musk-ox 

tainly will never be through their killing by white 
men or Indians. If any great value attached 
to the hide, it might be another story; but the 
truth is that the musk-ox robe is not a valuable 
fur, is sought after, indeed, but very little. It is 
too coarse to wear, and the only use to which it 
seems admirably adapted is as a sleigh-robe. 

There is no difficulty in getting Indians for 
the summer hunt, for then the labor is slight as 
compared with snow-shoeing, and there need be 
no considerable worry about provisions. Nor 
would there be but very little trouble in secur- 
ing Indians for the early autumn. The great 
difficulty I encountered in organizing my party 
was due solely to the time of year in which I 
made the venture. I was not particularly seeking 
hardship, but I had to go when I could get away 
from my professional duties, and that brought 
me to Great Slave Lake the first of March. 
February and March are the two severest months 
of the entire year in the Barren Grounds. It is 
the time when the storms are at their height and 
the thermometer at its lowest. No one had ever 
been into the Barren Grounds at that period, 
and the Indians, who are very loath to venture 
into an unknown country or at an unusual season, 



Seasons and Equipment 53 

were disinclined to accompany me. Indeed it 
was only by diplomatic handling of the leader 
and through the extremely kind offices of the 
Hudson's Bay Company post factor, Gaudet, 
that I ever succeeded in getting started. 

Perhaps it will serve those contemplating such 
a trip one day, to record here my personal equip- 
ment. 

One winter caribou-skin robe, lined with a pair 
of 4-point Hudson's Bay Company blankets. 

One winter caribou-skin capote (coat with hood). 

One heavy sweater. 

Two pairs of moose fur-lined mittens. 

One pair moose-skin gloves. (Worn inside of 
mittens.) 

One pair strouds (loose-fitting leggins). 

Three silk handkerchiefs. 

Eight pairs of moccasins. 

Eight pairs of duffel socks. 

One copper kettle (for boiling tea). 

One cup. 

45-90 Winchester half magazine rifle. 

Hunting-knife. (See cut page 45.) 

Compass. 

Spirit thermometer. 

10 pounds of tea. 



54 The Musk-ox 

12 pounds of tobacco. 

Several boxes of matches. 

Flint and steel and tinder. 

Two bottles of mustang liniment (which 
promptly froze solid and remained so; it was 
fortunate I did not have occasion to use it). 

In addition I carried, in case of emergency, 
such as amputation of frozen toes or other 
equally unpleasant incidents, — a surgeon's knife, 
antiseptic lozenges, bandages, and iodoform. Of 
this outfit no two articles were more important 
perhaps than the moose-skin gloves and the 
strouds. The gloves are worn inside the mittens 
and worn always; one never goes barehanded in 
the Barren Grounds at any time, day or night, 
if one is wise. The strouds (reaching above the 
knee and held up by a thong and loop attached 
to waist belt) catch the flying and freezing 
snow dust from the snow-shoes, thus protecting 
the trousers. I forgot to add, by the way, that 
I wore Irish frieze trousers, cut small at the 
bottoms so as to be easily tied about the ankles. 
My underwear was of the heaviest, and I carried 
a pair of moccasin slippers made of the unborn 
musk-ox calf, fur inside. If you ever make a trip 
after musk-oxen, do not bring in anything from 



Seasons and Equipment 55 

the outside, except your rifle, ammunition, and 
knife. Everything else you should secure at the 
outfitting post. There is nothing in this world 
that equals the caribou-skin capote for travel in 
the Northland ; it is very light and practically 
impervious to the wind. You will also carry 
with you a tepee, made of caribou skin. This 
tepee, or lodge, is not carried for your comfort 
or protection against inclement weather, but 
entirely for the protection of your camp-fire; be- 
cause the furious wind that sweeps the Barren 
Grounds in winter would not only blow out your 
flame but blow away your wood as well. The 
poles for your lodge you cut at the last wood 
and lash to the side of the sledge. 

In summer time the question of transportation 
is much simpler; you go by canoe and you do 
not need strouds or the winter caribou-skin 
capote. There is a very great difference between 
the winter and the summer caribou pelts, and 
the latter is used for the summer trips. Nor do 
you need a tepee in summer. 



IV 

Method of Hunting 

Among the Indians that live south and west 
of the Barren Grounds (no Indian Hves in the 
Barren Grounds), the method of hunting the 
musk-ox is practically the same, and, as I have 
shown in the early part of this paper, it is be- 
cause the Indians lack high hunting skill and 
because their dogs are neither trained nor coura- 
geous that bigger kills are not made. White 
hunters and trained dogs could practically wipe 
out every herd of musk-oxen they encountered; 
for while it is true that musk-oxen give you a long 
run once you have sighted them, yet when you get 
up to them, when the dogs have brought them to 
bay, it is almost like shooting cattle in a corral. 
There is always a long run. I think I never had 
less than three miles, and in the first hunt which 
I have described, I must have run nine or ten. 
But, as I say, when you get up to them it is easy, 
for they will stand to the dogs so long as the 

56 




EAST GREENLAND MUSK-OX CALF 

Collected at Fort Conger by Commander R. E. Peary, U.S.N. (From a photograph 
provided by the American Museum of Natural History) 




HEAD OF A TWO-YEAR-OLD MUSK-OX BULL 

Killed and photographed in the Barren Grounds by the author. The horns are just 
beginning to show a downward tendency. Hair over forehead is gray, short, and 
somewhat curly. The background is the tepee referred to in the text. 



Method of Hunting 59 

dogs bay them. And all this running would be 
unnecessary if the Indians exercised more hunt- 
ing skill and judgment. 

Although the prairie form of the country is 
not altogether the best for stalking, yet one could 
stalk comparatively near a herd before turning 
the dogs loose. The Indians never do this, and, 
in addition, the dogs set up a yelping and a howl- 
ing the moment they catch sight of the quarry. 
This, of course, starts off the musk-oxen, which 
invariably choose the roughest part of the coun- 
try, no doubt feeling, and rightly, too, that their 
pursuers will have the more difficult time follow- 
ing. Indian dogs are not always to be relied 
upon, for they have a disposition to hunt in a 
group, and your entire bunch of dogs is apt to 
stop and hold only three or four stragglers of 
the herd while the remainder of the musk-oxen 
escape. Sometimes when they stop practically 
the entire herd, the dogs are very likely, before 
you come up to them, to shift, leaving their 
original position and gradually drawing together ; 
perhaps, the whole pack of dogs finally holding 
only half a dozen, while the rest of the musk-oxen 
have run on. Musk-oxen, when stopped, invaria- 
bly form a circle with their sterns in and their 



6o The Musk-ox 

heads out; it matters not whether the herd is 
thirty or half a dozen, their action is the same. 
If there are only two, they stand stern to stern, 
facing out. I have seen a single musk-ox back 
up against a rock. Apparently they feel safe 
only when they get their sterns up against some- 
thing. * 

Hunting musk-oxen on the Arctic Coast or 
the Arctic islands after the manner of the polar 
expeditions, is a much simpler proposition. 
There the hunters are always comparatively near 
their base of supplies, and, from all accounts, the 
musk-oxen are more numerous than they are in 
the interior. According to Frederick Schwatka, 
the Innuits hunt musk-oxen with great skill. 
They hitch their dogs to the sledge differently 
from the method of the Indians to the south. 
The southern Indians hitch their four dogs in 
tandem between two common traces, one on each 
side ; while each Eskimo dog has his own single 
trace, which is hitched independently to the 
sledge. When the Innuits sight the musk-oxen, 
each hunter takes the dogs of his sledge, and 
holding their traces in his hand, starts after the 
game. The wisdom of this method is twofold : 
in the first place it immeasurably aids the running 



Method of Htmting 6i 

hunter, for the four or five straining dogs practi- 
cally pull him along; indeed, Schwatka says that 
when these Innuits come to a hill they squat 
and slide down, throwing themselves at full 
length upon the snow of the ascending bank, up 
which the excited dogs drag them without any 
effort on the part of the hunter. I should like 
to add here that if such a plan were pursued in 
the Barren Grounds over the rocky ridges, the 
remains of the hunter would not be interested 
in musk-ox hunting by the time the top of a 
ridge was reached. Seriously, the chief value of 
hunting in this style is that the hunter controls 
his four to six dogs, the usual number of the 
Eskimo sledge. When they have caught up with 
the musk-ox herd, he then looses them and he is 
there to begin action. The Eskimo dogs are 
very superior in breed to those used by the 
Indians farther south, and are trained as well 
to run mute. 

The chances of getting musk-oxen in the Barren 
Grounds are not so good in summer as in winter, 
because travelling by canoe you are, of course, 
bound to keep to the chain of lakes, and your 
course is therefore prescribed, it being impossible 
to travel over the land at will as it is in winter 



62 The Miisk-ox 

when all is frozen. One day's hunting is about 
like another. There is nothing to kindle the 
eye of the nature lover. In winter it is like 
travelling over a great frozen sea; in summer 
it is a great desolate waste of moss and lichen, 
dotted with lakes and rock-topped ridges, which 
observe no one or special form of direction. 
There is a black moss that the Indians sometimes 
burn if they can find it dry enough, and a little 
shrub that furnishes a bitter tea if the tea of civili- 
zation has run out. Nearly all of the lakes have 
fish, and a hunter ought really, with experience 
and judgment, to go in and out in summer time 
without suffering any excessive starvation. War- 
burton Pike, who has studied the Barren Grounds 
in summer time more thoroughly than any other 
man living, reports spots covered with wild 
flowers that grow to no height but in compara- 
tive profusion and some beauty. 

The distance you make in a summer day of 
Barren Grounds travel may depend entirely on 
your inclination, for with the fish and the moving 
caribou you are fairly well assured against hunger, 
and the weather is comparatively warm and per- 
mits of lingering along the route. It is quite 
another story in the winter, for then food is always 



Method of Hunting 6^ 

a problem, and every day draws on your slender 
supply of wood. Of course the farther you pene- 
trate, the nearer you get to the Arctic Coast, 
the more likely you are to see musk-oxen ; and 
the faster you travel, of course, the farther you 
can penetrate. We averaged about twenty 
miles a day. That means that we kept busy 
every hour from the time we started until we 
camped. The hour of starting depended very 
largely upon whether or not there was a moon. 
If there was a moon, we would get started so 
as to be well under way by daylight, which when 
we first entered the Barren Grounds would be 
about nine o'clock. If there was no moon, we 
waited for daylight. There always was a moon 
unless it stormed ; but it stormed most of the 
time. When there was a moon, however, it was 
always full. Travelling from Lac La Biche to 
Great Slave Lake on the frozen rivers, where it 
was a mere question of getting from one post to 
another, we used to start about two o'clock in 
the morning, the sun coming up about ten 
o'clock and setting at about three, and darkness 
falling almost immediately thereafter. In this 
river travelling I averaged a full thirty-five miles 
a day for the (about) nine hundred miles. 



64 The Musk-ox 

I think the most trying hour of the twenty-four 
in the Barren Grounds day was at the camping 
time in the afternoon. Beniah invariably chose 
the highest and most exposed position to be 
found, that our tepee might be the more visible 
to the scouts, kept out all day on either side look- 
ing for caribou, or musk-oxen ; and there was 
always the delaying discussion of the Indians 
amongst themselves, while I, chilled to the bone 
by the inaction, stood around awaiting the close 
of the argument before it was possible to get to 
the business of camp-making. Because the snow 
was packed so hard as to be impossible to shovel 
away with the snow-shoe, a rocky site was always 
sought, where we fitted our bodies to the uneven 
ground as best we could. With the camp site 
definitely chosen, a circle was made of the sledges, 
touching head and tail ; then three lodge poles, 
tied together at the top, were set up in the form 
of a triangle, with the ends stuck into the sledges 
to give them firm footing, and the four remaining 
poles placed so as to make a cone of the triangle. 
Over and around this was stretched the caribou- 
skin tepee, with the bottom edge drawn down 
and outside the sledges. Blocks of snow were 
then cut and banked up around the outside of 



Method of Hunting 67 

the tepee and against the sledges; all this by 
way of firmly anchoring the tepee, which set so 
low that one's head and shoulders would be in 
the open when standing upright in the centre ; 
but that was of no consequence, the lodge being 
set up merely as a protection to the fire. A 
short pole, also carried along from 
the last wood, was lashed from 
side to side of the tepee, on to the 
lodge poles proper, and from this, 
attached by a piece of babiche and 
a forked stick, hung the kettle. 
Then, all being ready, four or five 
sticks were taken from the sledges 
equally, and split into kindling 
wood with the heavy knife one 
needs to carry in musk-ox hunt- 
ing. Of course the fire furnished T^he Author's Barren 
c> Ground Hunting 

no warmth; it was not built for Knifeand ax (14 
that purpose ; it was simply to boil '"'^ ^^ °"^^ 
the tea, and perhaps I can best give an idea of 
its size in saying that by the time the snow in 
the kettle had been melted to water and the 
water begun to boil, — the fire was exhausted. 
While it blazed and the tea was making, always 
the close circle of seven hungry men, shoulder 



68 The Miisk-ox 

to shoulder, squatted around the light in the 
fancy that some heat must come from that little 
jumping flame. Outside that other circle of 
sledges, the dogs snuffed and sniffed and 
howled. Once I took off my gloves, with the 
thought of warming my fingers. I made no 
second experiment of the kind. 

Having drunk the tea, we rolled up in our 
fur robes, lying side by side around the tepee, 
with feet toward the fire and head against the 
sledge, knees into the back of the man next 
you, and snow-shoes under your head, away 
from the dogs that would eat the lacing. This 
was only preparation for sleep ; actual sleep, 
even to men as tired as we were, never came 
until the dogs had finished fighting over us; 
for so soon as we were rolled in our robes the 
dogs invariably poured into the tepee. As there 
were twenty-eight dogs, and the lodge about 
seven feet in diameter at its base, I need not 
further describe the situation. Truth is, that no 
hour in the day or night was more miserable than 
this, when these half-starved brutes fought over 
and on top of us before they finally settled down 
upon us. In extreme cold weather a dog curled 
up at your feet or at your back is not unpleas- 



Method of Hunting 69 

ant; but to have one lying on your head, an- 
other on your shoulders or hips, or perhaps a 
third on your feet, and you lying on your side 
on rocky, uneven ground — take my word for it, 
the experience is not happy. Of course you are 
entirely wrapped up, head and arms as well, in 
your sleeping robe ; if you rise up to knock 
the dogs off, you open your robe to the cold: 
and the dogs would be back on top of you again 
just as soon as you had lain down. 

It is all in the Musk-ox game ; and so you 
endure. 



V 

The Musk-ox 

Although there is nothing in the appearance 
or in the Ufe of the musk-ox to suggest romance, 
yet the Indians and the Eskimo surround it with 
much mystery. They say it is not Hke other 
animals, that it is cunning and plays tricks on 
them, that it is not safe to approach, that it under- 
stands what is said. The Indians among whom 
I travelled have a tradition that long years ago a 
woman wandered into the Barren Grounds, was 
lost, and finally turned into a musk-ox by the 
"enemy." Perhaps this accounts for the occa- 
sional habit these Indians have when pursuing 
musk-oxen of talking to them, instructing them 
as to the direction of their flight, etc. Several 
authors maintain that these Indians, when hunt- 
ing, do not talk to other animals ; but I have 
heard them jabbering while hunting caribou after 
the same manner they do when running after 
musk-oxen. Why the Indians should consider 

70 



The Musk-ox 73 

the musk-ox tricky or ferocious, appears to 
me to be the only mysterious element in the 
discussion ; a less ferocious looking animal for 
its size would, it seems to me, be impossible 
to find. Several Arctic explorers who have 
written on the musk-ox also refer to it as "for- 
midable " appearing and " ferocious," but those 
are the last adjectives that I should apply to the 
creature. The Indians and some of the Arctic 
authors also say that it is dangerous to approach, 
especially when wounded. My experience does 
not indorse that statement. We encountered 
about one hundred and twenty-five musk-oxen, 
killing forty-seven, and I did not see one that 
even suggested the charging proclivities for which 
it is given credit. They stand with lowered heads, 
making a hook at the dogs that are nearest, and 
on occasion making a movement forward, prac- 
tically a bluff at charging, but I never saw one 
really charge a dog, much less a man. I do not 
believe they can be induced to break the circle 
they invariably form, as they would, of course, do 
in charging. On one occasion I wounded a musk- 
ox badly enough to enable me to run him over 
and around a series of short ridges finally to a 
standstill. He was entirely alone, and I was 



74 The Musk-ox 

without a dog, and when I had got to within 
seventy-five feet of him he suddenly stopped 
running and faced me, setting his stern against a 
rock — or, rather, over it, for it was quite a small 
rock. I walked up to within about thirty or forty 
feet of him, and took a head shot. I thought 
to see if I could reach his brain, but the boss of 
his great frontal horn protects it, except for the 
small opening of an inch where the horns are 
divided. Then with an idea of putting a ball 
back of his shoulder or back of his ear, I tried 
to get on his side, but as I moved, he moved, 
always keeping his head straight at me, and we 
made several complete circles ; yet, in that time, 
— I suppose ten or fifteen minutes — he never 
offered to charge. If a straggling dog had not 
come my way and attracted the bull's attention, 
I probably never would have got the chance of 
a shoulder shot. Mr. Pike, whom, of living men, 
I consider to have made the most extended study 
of the musk-ox, agrees entirely with my view of 
the animal so far as its charging is concerned. 
Perhaps the musk-ox might charge if you walked 
up and pulled his ear, but I doubt if he would 
under less provocation, and really, I do not feel 
so certain that he would even then. He seems a 



The Musk-ox 75 

stupid, mild creature, — anything but " ferocious." 
In one little band of eight which we had sepa- 
rated from the main herd and killed, a yearling 
calf ran against my legs, seemingly seeking pro- 
tection from the dogs precisely as a young sheep 
would. 

The musk-ox appears, in fact, to be a veritable 
link between the ox and the sheep. It has the 
rudimentary tail, the molar teeth structure, the 
hairy muzzle, and the intestines of the sheep; 
while its short and wide canon-bones are like 
those of the ox, and differ widely from either 
sheep or goat. The hoofs are large, with curved 
toes and somewhat concave underneath, like the 
caribou hoof, which facilitates climbing rocky 
ridges and scraping away the snow from their 
only food, the lichen and the moss, for which 
purpose their horns are also admirably adapted. 
Mr. Rhodes has advanced the theory of the 
existence of a transition between the musk-ox 
and the bison, but the structure of the molar 
teeth and the rudimentary tail convince Profes- 
sor R. Lydekker, perhaps the foremost scientific 
authority, of the impossibility of there being any 
manner of relationship between the two groups. 
Scientifically, the musk-ox is of the genus Ovi- 



76 The Musk-ox 

BUS, divided into O. moschatus, the Barren Grounds 
and Greenland type, the O. wardi (Lydekker), 
and O. bombifrons, otherwise known as the Har- 
lan's musk-ox, an extinct type that, in a word, 
differed from the present living type largely in 




Forefoot of Barren Grounds Musk-ox. % actual size 

shape of the horns, which did not have the down- 
ward curve of those in existence, nor did the 
curve of the horns come closely to the head as 
they do now. Until 1898 O, moschatus was the 
only existing type known to either hunters or 
scientists. In that year, however. Lieutenant 
Peary, the Arctic explorer, killed in Bache Pen- 



The Musk-ox 



79 



insula, Greenland, a series of specimens which, on 
being sent to the Museum of Natural History of 
New York, were decided by Professor J. A. Allen 
as having sufficient distinction to warrant classi- 
fication. Meantime Rowland Ward, the Lon- 




Forefoot of East Greenland Musk-ox. % actual size 



don taxidermist, had secured, by purchase, a couple 
of similar specimens from East Greenland which 
Professor Lydekker recognized as a new variety, 
and in honor of Mr. Ward named O. moschatus 
wai^di. Mr. Ward's specimens were secured from 
whalers who, in turn, got them from trading with 
natives in East Greenland. Lieutenant Peary's 
specimens, however, were collected on the ground 



8o The Musk-ox 

by himself, and he is certainly entitled to the 
honor of the new variety bearing his name. So 
Professor Allen rightly thinks, and though he 
has adopted Professor Lydekker's name, he re- 
serves O. pearyi (Allen) as a provisionary one 
which may be accepted for the Grinnell Land 
animal in case it should prove to be separable. 
This, however, does not appear likely. The 
most distinguishing difference between the O. 
wardt, as called, or O. pearyi, as it should be 
known, and the O. moschatus, is in the head. 
The entire front of the new variety head is more 
or less gray instead of wholly brown, as is the 
O. moschatus ; while the horn base of the new 
variety is much narrower and slightly different in 
shape from those of the old variety. The skulls 
of the two varieties are practically alike ; at least 
there is very slight difference. The general color 
of the fur of the new variety is a little lighter, and 
the animal itself is not so large or heavily built. 

How either variety of musk-ox ever got to 
Greenland has been a subject of much discussion 
among scientists who seem now, however, to have 
finally decided that they reached the island from 
the west by crossing Smith Sound from Elles- 
mere Land, and by crossing Robeson's Channel 




SKULL OF THE EAST GREENLAND UUSK-OX — {Ouibos Wardi) 




V"''': 




SKULL OF THE BARREN GROUND MUSK-OX — (Owto5 
moschatus) 




SI D E V I EW — ( Ouibos Wardi ) 




SIDE VI EW — { Ouibos moschatus) 



The Miisk-ox 85 

from Grinnell Land, thence along the low Green- 
land Coast to East Greenland. Outside of the 
Arctic islands and of Arctic America so far south 
as the 62d parallel, the musk-ox is unknown. 
There was a time, however, when its range included 
all that part of the northern hemisphere between, 
roughly speaking, the Arctic Circle and the North 
Pole. It seems even possible that in the dim 
ages, the musk-ox had a wider and much more 
southern distribution, for the skull from which 
the extinct type bombifrons was named, was found 
in Kentucky, another having been found also in 
Arkansas. Fossil remains of musk-oxen have 
been unearthed in Siberia, Alaska, Grinnell Land, 
and Northern Europe. There is no authentic 
data of their having been found in Alaska 
within the memory of present living man, and 
they do not range within two hundred miles of 
the Mackenzie River, which is laid down as their 
western limit. Much has been said of their being 
of recent existence in Alaska. I made careful 
search for authentic data concerning their western 
range, but secured no information at all trust- 
worthy of even a tradition of them in Alaska; 
while nothing more certain than hearsay handed 
from father to son did I find as to their being 



86 The Musk-ox 

seen near the Mackenzie River. From time to 
time statements find their way into print of a 
musk-ox found in Alaska. Such misleading 
information is based on the tales of traders who 
may perhaps have got a musk-ox skin at some 
Alaskan post. Mr. Andrew J. Stone, who has 
spent several years in the Far North collecting 
for the Museum of Natural History, and who 
knows Alaska and all that great stretch of coun- 
try west of the Mackenzie River thoroughly, has 
covered this question in a statement published 
in an American Museum bulletin in 1901. It 
touches finally upon a question much agitated, 
and it seems to me sufficiently important to 
make permanent record here. Therefore I 
reproduce it. 

AS TO THE WESTERN RANGE OF MUSK-OXEN. 

Febr'y 28, 190 1. 
My dear Dr. Allen : — 

In response to your inquiry in reference to the existence of 
the musk-ox {^Ovibos moschattis) west of the Mackenzie River, 
or in Alaska, I will state there are none of these animals in any 
part of Arctic America west of the Mackenzie. Previous to 
my departure for the North in the spring of 1897, I had for 
several years carefully searched for information upon this sub- 
ject, and from what I had gathered I had a faint hope of 
finding some of these animals in the mountains west of the 



The Musk-ox 89 

Mackenzie, just south of the Arctic Coast. These mountains 
are known, respectively, as the Richardson, Buckland, British, 
Romanzof, and Franklin Mountains, but in reality they are the 
western extension of the main Rocky Mountain range that 
bends west from the Mackenzie along the Arctic Coast. On 
reaching the neighborhood of these mountains, however, in the 
winter of 1898-99, all hope of finding living specimens of 
musk-ox in them was destroyed. 

The Romanzof Mountains, from which specimens of musk- 
ox are reported to have recently been brought, by way of 
Camden Bay, are about one hundred and seventy-five miles 
west of Herschel Island. The Pacific Steam Whaling Com- 
pany, with offices at No. 30 California Street, San Francisco, 
have maintained a whaling station at Herschel Island for a 
number of years; there has also been established there for 
a number of years a Church of England Mission, under the 
direction of the Rev. I. O. Stringer. I visited Herschel Island 
in November and December, 1898, for the purpose of collect- 
ing all possible information relative to the animal life of those 
regions. On my way to and from Herschel Island I sledded 
the very base of the Davis Gilbert, Richardson, and Buckland 
Mountains. I stopped over night on both journeys with a lot 
of Eskimo, at that time hunting the Davis Gilbert Mountains 
and living in what is known as Oakpik (willow camp), in the 
extreme western part of the Mackenzie delta, very near the 
foot of the mountains. Specimens of Ovis dalli (white sheep) 
and of caribou and fur-bearing animals were plentiful in their 
camp, but there was no sign of musk-ox. 

At Shingle Point, on the Arctic Coast, near the Richardson 
Mountains, I spent several days with a man who was trading 
with the Eskimo who weie hunting the Richardson Mountains. 
There were several Eskimo in his camp at the time, and he 
had in his possession skins of the white sheep, caribou, and a 
variety of fur-bearing animals, but there was no sign of musk- 



90 The Musk-ox 

ox, and I learned on careful inquiry through my interpreter 
that the natives seemed to know nothing of them, with the 
exception of one young man who had been to the eastward 
on one of the whaling ships. The Tooyogmioots, a tribe of 
Eskimo who once lived along this coast and hunted these dif- 
ferent mountains, are now almost extinct. I found between 
the mouth of the Mackenzie and Herschel Island a very few 
individuals living in snow houses, but I did not find in or 
around their places of residence any sign of musk-ox skins, 
bones, or heads. 

I remained at Herschel Island from Nov. 24 to Dec. 14, 
visiting the Rev. I. O. Stringer and Capt. Haggerty of the 
steam-whaler, Ma?y Dehutne. Both men were able to con- 
verse readily with the Eskimo in the Eskimo tongue, and they 
gave me every possible assistance in making my inquiries. 
This whole coast far to the westward of Herschel Island is now 
occupied by the Noonitagmiott tribe of Eskimo. There were 
a large number of these people at the island, and among them 
were parties who hunted all the mountains of the mainland 
mentioned, living in the mountains a great part of the time. 
Many skins of caribou, sheep, and fur-bearing animals were 
seen in the possession of these people, but none of them pos- 
sessed any part of the musk-ox, and the only members of the 
tribe who knew anything of the musk-ox were those who had 
been carried to the east by whaling ships. The Rev. Mr. 
Stringer takes great interest in the natural resources of the 
country and travels extensively among these people, but he 
had no knowledge of the existence of any musk-oxen west 
of the Mackenzie. Capt. Haggerty had wintered along this 
coast for a number of years, trading extensively with the 
natives, but he had never secured or heard of a musk-ox skin 
west of the Mackenzie. 

All the whaling ships, which have wintered here for years, 
sometimes as many as fifteen at the same time, keep Eskimo 



The Musk-ox 91 

hunters in the field continually for the purpose of securing 
fresh meat for the crews, sending white sailors in charge of 
dog sleds to visit the Eskimo camps to bring in the meat. It 
is not uncommon for these sleds to go one hundred and fifty 
to two hundred miles for meat, and all the mountains to the 
north and west of Herschel Island have been visited many 
times by these hunters and sledding parties, without obtaining 
any trace of musk-ox. CoUinson, who wintered near Camden 
Bay in 1853-54, does not mention the musk-ox. The U. S. 
Government Survey party, which wintered on the Porcupine 
several years ago and visited Rampart House, a Hudson Bay 
trading post at the Ramparts on the Porcupine River, and who 
went from there with Mr. John Firth, the Hudson Bay Com- 
pany's trader, north through these mountains to the Arctic 
Coast and returned, did not find musk-ox. Several white 
men have travelled back and forth through these mountains 
from Fort Yukon, on the Yukon River, to Herschel Island, for 
the purpose of securing sled dogs of the Eskimo on the Arctic 
Coast, to be used on the Yukon, without securing or learn- 
ing anything of the musk-ox. Mr. Hodgson and Mr. Firth, 
both in the service of the Hudson Bay Company, have been 
stationed at Fort Yukon at the mouth of the Porcupine, at 
Rampart House on the Porcupine, and at Lapierres House on 
Bell River, a tributary of the Porcupine, during a period of 
over thirty years, trading with the Loucheaux Indians, several 
tribes of which hunt north of these places into the mountains 
mentioned, without ever obtaining any knowledge of the exist- 
ence of musk-ox ; and the Hudson Bay Company have never 
secured at any of these posts any skins of the musk-ox. 

Previous to the advent of the whalers on this coast, the 
coast Eskimo also traded at these Hudson Bay posts. The 
country between the Porcupine River and the Arctic Coast, in 
which district the mountains above mentioned are situated, is 
entirely accessible from the north or south, and every part of it 



92 The Musk-ox 

has been hunted for years by the Eskimo and Indians. Barter 
Island, near Camden Bay, has been the rendezvous of the 
north coast Eskimo for years, where they meet every summer 
to barter and trade with each other. At one of these mid- 
summer festivals there may be seen spotted reindeer skins 
from Siberia, walrus ivory and walrus skins from Bering Sea, 
or the stone lamps from the land of the Cogmohks (the far- 
away people) of the East, and it is not impossible, though 
hardly probable, that musk-ox skins might be found there. 

I also travelled through the country of the Kookpugmioots 
and Abdugmioots of the Arctic Coast, east of the Mackenzie. 
The first people encountered along the coast east of the Mac- 
kenzie are the Kookpugmioots — they hunt the coast country 
as far east as Liverpool Bay, but many of their best hunters 
never saw a musk-ox. The Abdugmioots originally hunted 
the Anderson River country, but now live around Liverpool 
Bay, and most of them have hunted musk-ox. The Kogmo- 
liks, who once lived around Liverpool and Franklin Bays, but 
who are now practically merged with the Kookpugmioots, 
along the shores of Allen Channel, have been musk-ox killers. 

A good many of the Port Clarence natives, living near 
Bering Straits, have killed musk-oxen, but only around the 
head of Franklin Bay and on Parry Peninsula, they having 
been taken there by whalers. Nearly all the whaling ships 
pick up Port Clarence natives, on their way north and east to 
the whaling grounds, and keep them with them until their 
return, perhaps thirty months later. Some of these vessels 
have wintered at Cape Bathurst and in Langton Bay at the 
head of Franklin Bay. Four of these vessels wintered in 
Langton Bay in 1897-98, and during the winter their Eskimo 
and sailors killed about eighty head of musk-oxen, most of 
which were taken on the Parry Peninsula. When I was at 
Herschel Island, in the winter of 1898, I saw forty of these 
skins in one of the warehouses of the Pacific Steam Whaling 



The Musk-ox 93 

Company. They were the property of Capt. H. H. Bodfish of 
the steam whaler Beluga. 

The range of the musk-ox at the present time does not 
extend westward to within three hundred miles of the Mac- 
kenzie delta. Any information concerning the musk-ox gath- 
ered around Point Barrow and thence south to Bering Straits 
and Port Clarence, has been obtained from natives who have 
accompanied whaling ships to the East ; and all the musk-ox 
skins that find a market in San Francisco have been purchased, 
directly or indirectly, from the whaling ships. 

Very truly yours, 

Andrew J. Stone. 

Wherever explorers have gone into Eastern 
Arctic North America they have found the musk- 
ox. Lieutenant Peary, who has spent more time 
in the Arctic than any other living man, writes 
that he has killed musk-oxen at Cape Bryant on 
the Northwest Coast, and at the extreme northern 
end of Greenland Archipelago, north latitude 
83° 39', and it appears from lack of records to the 
contrary that they are found on all the Arctic 
islands except, curiously enough, the Islands of 
Spitzbergen and Franz Josef Land, where they are 
unknown. That the musk-ox does not seem to 
migrate on the ice from island to island as the 
reindeer do, is another curious fact. 

Frederick Schwatka, who hunted along the 
Arctic Coast, and one or two of the scientists, 



94 The Musk-ox 

place the southerly range of the musk-oxen at the 
6oth parallel, but this is fully two, if not four, 
degrees too far south to correctly represent their 
present range. Hearne saw tracks in latitude 59°, 
and musk-oxen in latitude 61°, in 1771, but I have 
never heard of musk-oxen being killed within 
recent years so far south as the 62d parallel. It 
is conceivable, however, that they might stray so 
far south, though in my opinion highly improbable. 
Pike records a musk-ox killed at Aylmer Lake, in 
the Barren Grounds. This is the most southerly 
killing that I have heard of, and the most south- 
erly one of which Mr. Pike makes record. Aylmer 
Lake is just above the 64th parallel. I saw no 
musk-oxen below the 65th degree, and it was my 
experience, as well as Pike's, that musk-oxen are 
not what you may, comparatively speaking, call 
plentiful until the 66th parallel. 

Some writers persist in calling the musk-ox 
migratory, but there is no reason for doing so. 
When fully grown, it is about the size of the 
English black cattle, its height being 4 feet 2 
to 4 inches at the shoulder, and its girth very 
large for its height. Indians estimate the flesh of 
a mature cow musk-ox equal to that of about three 
Barren Grounds caribou, which would be from 



The Musk-ox 97 

three hundred to three hundred and fifty pounds ; 
the bull may go as much as two hundred pounds 
heavier. They travel in herds varying from half 
a dozen to thirty or forty. Some authors have 
referred to "vast herds," no doubt confusing 
musk-oxen with caribou. Fifty would be a large 
herd, and I suppose from ten to twenty would 
fairly represent the size of the average herd. As 
a rule, such a sized herd would have one or two 
bulls. I found herds that were all bulls, others 
that were all cows. 

The robe is of a very dark brown, which seems 
black against the snow, and the hair all over 
the body is coarse and long, reaching down 
below the belly to the knees (especially long 
on the rump, where I measured some that was 
fifteen to twenty inches), and under the throat 
it hangs down as a thick mane. There appears 
to be a decided tendency to a hump, which is 
emphasized by the shorter stiifish hair that 
covers shoulders and the base of the neck. 
And there is a saddle mark of a dirty grayish 
white. Underneath this hair and over all the 
body grows a coat of mouse gray wool of fine 
texture, which protects the animal in winter and 
is shed in the summer. No wool grows on the 



98 The Musk-ox 

legs, which are massive, and although short, 
appear to be shorter than they are because of the 
long hair that falls over them. In running, they 
have a rolling, choppy kind of a gait, and I 
noticed when they fell from a rifle wound they 
could not get on their feet again. 

The growth of the horn is very interesting. It 
begins exactly as with domestic cattle by a straight 
shoot out from the head. For the first year, 
it is impossible to tell the difference between the 
sexes by the horns. In the second year, the bull 
horn is a little whiter than that of the cow ; the 
forehead of a two-year musk-ox I killed showed a 
forehead covered with short, curlish hair. In 
this year the cow's horn begins to show a down- 
ward turn, and is fully developed at its third year. 
The bull's horns, on the contrary, are just begin- 
ning to spread at the base in the third year. They 
continue spreading toward the centre of the fore- 
head until they meet in the bull's fifth year, but in 
the sixth year they begin to separate, leaving a 
crevice in the centre which widens as the bull 
ages until it is from an inch to an inch and a half 
wide. In the cow these crevices also open by age 
to even a greater extent than in the bull. The 
horns of both bull and cow darken as they reach 



The Miisk-ox 99 

their full development, until they are quite dark 
from six to eight inches toward the base ; and 
as the animal ages the extreme darkness of horn 
disappears, until finally in the old animal of either 
sex there remains only a black tip about a couple 
of inches on the very point of the horn. As the 
crevice between the horns in both sexes widens, 
the base of the boss on each side thickens to at 
least three inches in the bull and two or less in the 
cow. On the boss the horn is corrugated, but at 
the turn it becomes smooth, and is polished like 
an ox horn on the point. 

The largest horns of which I believe there 
is record are owned by a taxidermist who pur- 
chased them ; but the locality from which they 
came is unknown. Their breadth, measured up 
and down at the crevice of the boss, or, tech- 
nically speaking, the breadth of palm, is 13J 
inches ; the length of horns on outside curve, 30J 
inches. The next largest pair is in the British 
Museum and measures 13J inches in breadth and 
26J in length. The third is i2f by 26f, presented 
to the British Museum by J. Rae, an old time 
Hudson's Bay Company factor, and got on the 
Barren Grounds. The next is i2-|- by 27J, the 
property of the Earl of Lonsdale, who picked up 

L.ofC. 



100 The Musk-ox 

the head on his way down the Mackenzie River, 
several years ago. Warburton Pike holds the 
two next heads, one 1 1 by 2 6 J, and the other 
1 1 by 24J. The largest head I killed is rather 
remarkable in respect to length of horn and thick- 
ness of the boss. Indian hunters who saw it, at 
all events, considered it most unusual. It meas- 
ures II J by 27J; width of crevice, ij inch; thick- 
ness of boss at crevice, 3f inches. 

The flesh of the musk-ox is exceedingly tough, 
and by no means pleasing to the taste, especially 
in the rutting season (August and September), 
when it is practically uneatable. There is a cer- 
tain musky odor, but it is not so pronounced as 
generally said to be. In fact the only distinct 
musk-ox odor is got from breaking and crushing 
the dry dung. As indicative of this queer crea- 
ture, I may add that musk-ox dung is but very 
little larger than and of very near the shape and 
color as that of the large hare. The flesh of the 
cow is by no means choice, but it is not bad ; 
the flesh of the calf I found to be rather tasteless. 
The unborn calf is considered quite a delicacy, 
of which my Indians did not deny themselves 
merely because we had no cooking fire. They ate 
it raw, just as they took it from the mother's 




CO tio-a 



< 


J3 


o 


>i 


X 


Da 


o 


c 


^ 


c 


c/) 


n 


D 


U, 



t^ J^ ■" 



The Musk-ox 103 

stomach. Cows never give birth to more than 
one calf at a time, born in June. 

On only two occasions have musk-oxen been 
brought alive into captivity in North America. 
One of these was an eighteen months' old female 
caught east of Lady Franklin Bay, about thirty 
miles inland, by a party sent out by Captain H. 
H. Bodfish, of the whaler Beluga. This was 
exhibited at the Sportsmen's Show in New York, 
where it was purchased by the Hon. William C. 
Whitney and presented to the Zoological Society 
of New York in March, 1902. The other was a 
younger specimen caught in Northeastern Green- 
land by Lieutenant Peary and brought out and 
presented to the Zoological Society by him in 
October of the same year. Both specimens, how- 
ever, died within a few months. Up to now I 
believe something like a dozen live specimens 
have been taken out to the civilized world. All, 
however, at this writing, have died, except two or 
three. One is in a zoological garden at Copen- 
hagen, another in a zoological garden at Berlin, 
and another is in England, owned by the Duke 
of Bedford, but exhibited, I am told, in London. 



I04 The Musk-ox 

MUSK-OX 

(OVIBOS MOSCHATUS ^) 

In spite of its name this Arctic ruminant has 
no near affinity with the members of the ox tribe, 
the cheek teeth being more like those of the 
sheep and goats, the muzzle, except for a small 
strip between the nostrils, hairy, and the tail 
reduced to a mere stump concealed among the 
long hair of the hind quarters. On the other 
hand, the resemblance to the sheep is not very 
close, the horns, which in old males nearly meet 
in the middle line of the forehead, being of a 
totally different form and structure, and the skull 
likewise very distinct. In the males the horns 
are much flattened and expanded at the bases, 
after which they are bent suddenly down behind 
the eyes, to curve upward at the tips. In the 
females they are much smaller, less expanded, 
and not approximated at their bases. In both 
sexes their texture is coarse and fibrous, and their 
color yellow. The long coat of dark brown 
hair, depending from the back and sides like a 
mantle, affords an adequate protection against 

^ " Records of Big Game," Rowland Ward, third edition. 



The Musk-ox 105 

the rigors of an Arctic winter; and the broad, 
spreading hoofs, with hair on their under surface, 
give a firm foothold on snow and ice. Two races 
are known — the typical Canadian and the Green- 
land {O. moschatus wardi). The latter is charac- 
terized by the presence of a certain amount of 
white on the forehead and the smaller expansion 
of the horns. Height at shoulder about 4 feet; 
weight of one weighed in parts, 579 pounds 
(D. T. Hanbury). 

Distrihition. — Arctic America, approximately 
north and east of a line drawn from the mouth of 
the Mackenzie River to Fort Churchill on Hud- 
son Bay, Greenland, and Grinnell Land, in latitude 
32° 27'; approximate southern limit, latitude 
40° N. 



io6 



The Musk-ox 

Measurements of Horns 



Length 

ON 

Outside 
Curve 


Breadth 

OF 

Palm 


Tip to 
Tip 


Locality 


Owner 


27| 


i3f 
10 


30J 

27i 


? 
Barren grounds of 
northern Canada 


W. W. Hart 
David T, Hanbury 


-27i 


III 


23 


Barren grounds of 
northern Canada 


Caspar Whitney 


27i 


I2| 


27 


Barren grounds of 
northern Canada 


Earl of Lonsdale 


-27i 


IO| 


27i 


Barren grounds of 
northern Canada 


Imperial Museum, 
Vienna 


26| 


II 


27 


Barren grounds of 
northern Canada 


Warburton Pike 


26| 


I2f 




North America 


British Museum 


26^ 


i3i 


271 


North America 


(J. Rae) 
British Museum 


— 25I 


10 


25 


North America 


Dr. Albert von 


24f 

24i 

24i 


II 

7i 


251 

19 
26 


Barren grounds 
Barren grounds 
Barren grounds 


Stephani 
Warburton Pike 
J. Talbot Clifton 
Hon. Walter Roths- 
child 


24 


91 


23i 


North America 


Sir Edmund G. Loder, 
Bart. 


—24 




25 


? 


Major W. Anstruther 
Thomson 


23i 
-2li 


6 
9 


22| 
27 


? 
? 


A. Barclay Walker 
Dublin Museum 


-92ii 


4f 


20| 


? 


Imperial Museum, 
Vienna 


9i8f 


4i 




North America 


British Museum 


917 


4f 


9l 


North America 


(A. G. Dallas) 
Dr. Albert von 
Stephani 



MUSK-OX {Ovibos moschatus tvardi) 




Greenland 
Greenland 



Rowland Ward 
Rowland Ward 



THE BISON 

By George Bird Grinnell 




THE LAST OF THE HERD 



THE BISON 

The buffalo was the largest and economically 
the most important of North American mammals. 
It was also one of the most numerous, and over 
a great area of the continent was practically the 
sole support of its aboriginal inhabitants. Within 
the memory of men who as yet are hardly middle- 
aged, it roamed the country between the Missouri 
River and the Rocky Mountains, in multitudes 
so vast that it was commonly stated that its num- 
bers could not be materially reduced, that it would 
exist long after the speakers had died. Yet, 
within thirty years it has so absolutely disap- 
peared that the number of living wild buffalo 
existing to-day is probably not greater than the 
herd of European bison — commonly, but erro- 
neously, called aurochs — so carefully preserved 
in the forests of Lithuania by the Russian Czar. 

The history of the buffalo's extermination has 
been many times written, and the cause of its dis- 
appearance is not far to seek. It was killed in 



112 The Bison 

great numbers by the Indians, who used its flesh 
for food, its skin for clothing and for their shelters. 
Yet, under natural conditions, the destruction 
which they wrought was never very extensive, 
and was more than compensated for by the annual 
increase. Wolves, bears, and other wild animals 
which were found in great numbers throughout 
the buffalo's range in old days, devoured many of 
them ; but these were largely the aged, wounded, 
and crippled, or those which were drowned in the 
rivers, or mired in quicksands and mud-holes. 
I All this destruction by natural enemies did little 
'more than keep the race in good condition, by 
cutting off the sickly and the feeble. 

When, however, the white man appeared on 
the scene, new conditions arose. The buffalo 
had a robe which was as useful to the white man 
as to the Indian. A trade speedily sprang up in 
these robes, which the Indians were glad to kill 
and tan for a cupful of sugar, or a few charges of 
powder and ball, or a drink or two of alcohol. 
Now, the Indians had a motive for killing which 
heretofore they had not had. They killed more 
buffalo and made more robes than before, but 
still they made no impression on the wandering 
millions which swayed to and fro under the influ- 



The Bison 113 

ence of the seasons. Steamboats might pass down 
the Missouri River loaded to the guards with 
bales of robes, but the vast herds of buffalo showed 
no diminution. The early white explorers, or 
trappers, or traders, did not themselves take the 
trouble to collect buffalo hides ; there were more 
valuable furs in the country, beaver and otter and 
bears, which brought better prices, and — more 
important than this — did not require to be tanned 
before they became marketable. For a buffalo 
skin untanned was never shipped; it was only 
after some Indian woman had expended on it 
days of patient labor, that it would bring at the 
trading post the pitiful reward which the white 
man gave. 

At last, however, — and that was less than forty 
years ago, — a railroad began to push its way out 
on to the broad plains lying between the Missouri 
River and the Rockies, and to thrust itself into 
the very region where the buffalo fed. Over the 
shining rails of this railroad trains began to pass, 
carrying passengers ; and among these were many 
white men eager for gain. These at once saw 
the possibilities of the buffalo. At first they 
killed them for meat, but soon the hides began to 
be shipped also. And other men, learning that 



114 ^^^ Bison 

the buffalo hides brought ^2.00 eacli, and that 
buffalo were to be had for the trouble of shooting 
them, crowded into the range. 

Then there began along the Platte Valley in 
Nebraska, a scene of slaughter which has seldom 
been equalled. The country was full of buffalo 
skinners. Each hunter had his teams, and his 
gangs of skinners which followed him about from 
place to place, and cared for the hides of the 
beasts which he killed. In some places the only 
water accessible was the Platte River, and here 
the buffalo came to drink. Here, too, the hunters, 
concealed in ravines or in rifle-pits that they had 
dug, shot down the beasts one by one, as they 
came to water, and, indeed, formed so complete a 
cordon along the river's banks, that the buffalo 
could not get through and turned back into the 
hills. When at night the thirsty herds tried to 
approach the river under cover of darkness, they 
found that the hunters had built along the bottom 
great fires, which they kept up all night, and 
which the scared buffalo did not dare to pass. 

It took but a little time to split the herd which 
for centuries had passed across the valley north 
and south with the seasons. It was about 1870 
when this work began, and in 1874 the buffalo 



The Bison 115 

were last seen in the valley of the Platte. The 
herd had been split. 

As other railroads to the southward pushed 
into the buffalo country, the same scenes were 
enacted. The buffalo country swarmed with 
hunters who came in constantly increasing num- 
bers, so that none of them earned any money 
by their butcher's work. The price of hides fell, 
but the buffalo continued to be slaughtered. Hun- 
dreds of thousands of hides went to market, but 
these were only a small proportion of the buffalo 
killed. Colonel Dodge has expressed the belief, 
that of the buffalo killed, only one-fourth or one- 
fifth reached a market. It is conceivable that 
the proportion was even less. A very large num- 
ber of the hunters knew nothing about hunting, 
or shooting, or skinning a buffalo, or curing its 
hide. The number of maimed and crippled ani- 
mals that went off to die was very large. The 
number of hides ruined in skinning was large, 
and the number improperly cured was still larger. 

By the latter part of 1874, buffalo to the south- 
ward of the Platte River began to be very scarce, 
and in 1876 they were almost gone. After that 
none were found in the southern country except 
a few in the southern portion of the Indian 



ii6 The Bison 

Territory and in the waterless country of the 
pan-handle of Texas. There, protected by the 
drought, and so few in number as to present little 
attraction to the skin hunter, a few lingered for 
some years, until finally captured or destroyed by 
Buffalo Jones in his expeditions after calves for 
domestication. 

In the northern country the buffalo lingered 
longer. The Northern Pacific Railroad, built as 
far west as Bismarck on the Missouri River in 
1873, stopped there for six or seven years, and it 
was not until it had been continued well beyond 
the Missouri that it again entered the buffalo 
range and brought with it, as was inevitable, the 
buffalo skinner. When he came, he did the work 
he had done in the South, and did it as effec- 
tively. But as the number of buffalo left in the 
northern herd was small, it took only two or 
three years to destroy them. 

After 1883, except for a band of about five 
thousand which had been overlooked on one of 
the Sioux reservations, there were no buffalo left 
in the northern country except a few scatter- 
ing individuals, which, hidden in out-of-the-way 
places, had been overlooked by the hunters and 
Indians, and so for a year or two were preserved 



The Bison 117 

from slaughter. In the arid region about the 
heads of the Dry Fork and Porcupine Creek in 
Montana, one of these little groups was left, 
which yielded to expeditions sent out by the 
National Museum and the American Museum 
of Natural History, a series of specimens, proba- 
bly the last of this species ever to be collected for 
science. They were brought together just in 
time, for since then there have been no buffalo. 
A small herd of the so-called wood bison still 
inhabits the vast wilderness between Athabasca 
Lake and Lesser Slave Lake, but their numbers 
are few. In the year 1900 there were two little 
bunches of wild buffalo in the United States, per- 
haps neither of them numbering more than fifteen 
or twenty head. In the summer of 1901 one of 
these bunches, which had long ranged in Lost 
Park, Colorado, was wiped out by poachers, while 
for some years nothing has been heard of the 
other little band which ranged in Montana, and 
which, in 1895, numbered forty or fifty head, no 
less than thirty-two of which were killed a year 
or two later by Red River half-breeds who made 
a special trip to their range. At present the only 
important band of buffalo in the United States is 
that ranging within the confines of the National 



ii8 The Bison 

Park, and it is altogether probable that this does 
not number more than twenty-five or thirty. 

No doubt the extraordinary abundance of the 
buffalo had something to do with the wasteful- 
ness of the slaughter which followed the railroad 
building into the buffalo range. Many people no 
doubt really believed that in their time the buffalo 
could not be exterminated. They seemed to rea- 
son that as there always had been " millions of 
buffalo " there always would be. Men killed buf- 
falo for any foolish, childish reason that might 
come into their heads, — to try their guns, to see 
whether they could hit them, for fun ! 

How wantonly even some of the first traders 
destroyed them is often shown by the few writ- 
ings that have come down to us from those early 
days. Henry, in his Journal of August, 1800, 
tells of the way in which he and some of his men 
passed the time while waiting for others of his 
people to come up. He says, " We amused our- 
selves by lying in wait, close under the bank, for 
the buffalo which came to drink. When the poor 
brutes came to within about ten yards of us, on a 
sudden we would fire a volley of twenty-five guns 
at them, killing and wounding many. We only 
took the tongues. The Indians suggested that 



The Bison 119 

we should all fire together at one lone bull which 
appeared, to have the satisfaction, as they said, of 
killing him stone dead. The beast advanced till 
he was within six or eight paces, when the yell 
was given, and all hands let fly; but instead of 
falling he galloped off, and it was only after sev- 
eral more discharges that he was brought to the 
ground. The Indians enjoyed this sport highly 
— it is true, the ammunition cost them nothing." i 

There has been much misunderstanding as to 
the former distribution of the buffalo over the 
North American continent, and the extent of 
territory through which it was found. Many 
respected authorities have declared that it oc- 
curred in Eastern Canada, and generally along 
the Atlantic slope ; in portions of New England, 
the Middle states, and south even into Florida. 
It was said in general terms that the buffalo 
occurred over the entire continent of North 
America, from Florida to the 50th degree of 
north latitude. 

These loose statements were corrected by Dr. 
J. A. Allen, in his most important monograph on 
the American bisons, and it is now well under- 
stood that the range of the buffalo included only 
about one-third of the continent ; that, while it was 



120 The Bison 

found on the Atlantic slope, this was only in the 
southeastern portion of its range; while in Can- 
ada, New England, and Florida, it was probably- 
unknown. 

The error into which early writers were led on 
this subject undoubtedly arose from the terms 
used by the earlier explorers, who spoke constantly 
of vaches, or vaches sauvages, and less frequently 
of buffu or buffle. But the term wild cows, used 
by the early French Jesuits and English explorers, 
referred to the elk {Cervus canadensis), while the 
words buffu or buffle were used to designate moose 
{Alces). In some of the narratives of the journeys 
of the Jesuit travellers, there appear on almost 
every page references to the herds of vaches 
sauvages, and many of these writers, at one time 
or another, describe these wild cows in such 
unmistakable language as to show beyond ques- 
tion that they were the elk or wapiti. 

Dr. Allen assigns the Alleghany Mountains as 
the general eastern boundary of the range of the 
buffalo, although explaining that it frequently 
passed beyond that range, and showing conclu- 
sively that it occurred in the western portions 
of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North and 
South Carolina and Georgia. Mr. Hornaday 



The Bison m 

cites some evidence to show that it occurred in 
the District of Columbia, and quotes Francis 
Moore, in his " Voyage to Georgia," to prove that 
there, at least, buffalo were found close to the salt 
water. 

While Dr. Allen gives the Tennessee River as 
the southern boundary of the buffalo's range, west 
of the Alleghanies and east of the Mississippi 
River, Mr. Hornaday quotes a number of refer- 
ences to show that it occurred in some numbers 
in what is now the state of Mississippi, and gives 
a tradition of the Choctaws, narrated by Clay- 
borne, in regard to the disappearance of the 
species from that section. This tradition is to 
the effect that during the early part of the 
eighteenth century a great drought occurred 
there by which the whole country was dried up. 
For three years not a drop of rain fell. Large 
streams went dry, and the forest trees all died. 
Up to that time, it is said, elk and buffalo had 
been numerous there, but during this drought 
these animals crossed the Mississippi River and 
never returned. 

In the eastern portion of its range, the Great 
Lakes formed a barrier on the north which the 
buffalo did not pass ; but from western New York 



122 The Bison 

westward, it was found in numbers along the 
southern shores of these lakes, and in the territory 
now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wis- 
consin. Audubon tells us that in the first years 
of the nineteenth century there were buffalo in 
Kentucky, but declares that about 1810, or soon 
after, they all disappeared. This disappearance 
was due chiefly to their actual destruction by 
white men and by Indians, and not, as is com- 
monly stated, to the retiring of the great herds 
before the advance of settlement and civilization. 
It seems that the last buffalo were killed east of 
the Mississippi River about the year 1820, al- 
though it may be that in Wisconsin and Minne- 
sota they lasted somewhat longer. 

West of the Great Lakes, and turning sharply 
northward so as to run nearly northwest, the east- 
ern border of the buffalo's range west of the Mis- 
sissippi was a line running very near the western 
extremity of Lake Superior, up through the Lake 
of the Woods, west of Lake Winnipeg, and thence 
northward to and beyond the Great Slave Lake. 
There this border line turned to the west, and 
then sharply to the south, and meeting the Rocky 
Mountains not far from where Peace River leaves 
them, followed the range south, about to the 49th 



The Bison 123 

parallel; and then turning southwestwardly and 
including Idaho, a part of eastern Oregon, the 
northeast corner of Nevada, the greater portion of 
Utah, and most of New Mexico, the line passed 
down south well into Mexico, turning eastwardly 
just north of the 25th parallel of latitude, and run- 
ning north to the coast, which it followed around 
again to the mouth of the Mississippi. 

As it has been known in our day, the buffalo 
in the southern portion of its range was a trans- 
Missouri animal. North of the parallel of 45 
degrees it was found in equal numbers on both 
sides of the Missouri River, and in its north- 
ern extension reached, and possibly even to-day 
reaches, north to Great Slave Lake ; for, as already 
stated, the only considerable band of wild buffalo 
to-day is the wood bison of the north, estimated 
to number four hundred or five hundred. 

Besides the boundaries thus set forth, it is prob- 
able that in early days there was a considerable 
extension of the buffalo's range northward and 
westward, into portions of what is now Alaska. 
Certain it is that in that territory buffalo remains 
have been found in great numbers. Some of these 
skulls belong to species long extinct, and much 
larger than the American bison ; but, on the other 



124 The Bison 

hand, there are many which are closely similar to 
that species. 

The range of the buffalo to the west of the 
Rocky Mountains began to contract not very 
long after the narrowing of its range on the 
east. The earlier explorers in the West, from 
Pike downward, report buffalo in abundance. 
Yet, as already stated, the westernmost point at 
which their remains have been found is among 
the foot-hills of the eastern side of the Blue 
Mountains of Oregon. In 1836, it is reported, 
buffalo were abundant in Salt Lake Valley, but 
there nearly all were soon afterward destroyed 
by deep snows, which covered the ground for a 
long period of time. This corresponds well with 
statements made to me by John Robinson, better 
known in early days as Uncle Jack Robinson, 
one of the old-time trappers, who died between 
1870 and 1880. In 1870 he told me that the 
buffalo on the tributaries of the Green River and 
on the Laramie Plains had all perished nearly 
forty years before, during a winter when very 
deep snows fell, followed by a thaw and subse- 
quent cold, which crusted the snow so that the 
buffalo could not get through it, and starved to 
death. This statement was confirmed by the 



The Bison 125 

small number of remains, most of them extremely 
old and weathered, which we found in this region 
at that time. On the other hand, on upper tribu- 
taries of the Green River buffalo were found 
much later, and it is possible that these may have 
been animals which wintered in narrow valleys 
of the mountains, where, during this deep snow, 
food was accessible. Fremont states that in the 
spring of 1824 buffalo were abundant as far west 
as Fort Hall, while Bonneville reported them in 
extraordinary abundance in the Bear River Valley. 

The mere fact that buffalo were not seen by 
an explorer who passed through any given terri- 
tory does not necessarily show that they did not 
range in that country. I have travelled for 
months through a buffalo range without seeing 
buffalo or any evidence of their very recent 
presence, yet the signs found showed conclu- 
sively that a short time before they had been 
there in vast numbers. It would have been per- 
fectly possible for two honest reports, made a few 
months or years apart by explorers who were not 
prairie men, absolutely to contradict each other. 

Although the buffalo disappeared from the 
country west of the Green River, and even from 
the Laramie Plains, a long time ago, it lin- 



126 The Bison 

gered much later on tributaries of the Platte 
River further to the northward. There were 
buffalo on the Sweetwater and its tributaries 
between 1870 and 1880, and on certain other 
tributaries of the North Platte River between 
1880 and 1890. About this same time there 
was a small band ranging in what is called the 
Red Desert Country, south of what is now the 
National Park. But the last of these disap- 
peared about 1890. 

The color of the buffalo is well understood to 
be a dark liver brown over most of the body, 
changing to black on the long hair of the fore 
legs, muzzle, and beard. The long hair on the 
hump is yellowish, faded from sunburn, and often 
much the color of the hair of a "tow-headed 
child." The mountain bison, which lives largely 
in the timber, and is scarcely or not at all ex- 
posed to the sun, is much darker, sometimes 
almost black, throughout. 

Very rarely buffalo of unusual color were seen. 
These were sometimes roan, sometimes gray or 
spotted with white, or even pure white through- 
out. A hide taken on the upper Missouri about 
1879 was white on the head, legs, and belly, and 
elsewhere of normal color; the result was that 



The Bison 127 

when the animal was skinned and the hide 
tanned there was a fine robe of the ordinary 
color bordered with a wide band of white. If I 
recollect aright, this particular hide was sold on 
the river to an Englishman for $500. 

Buffalo of unusual color, being so seldom seen, 
were regarded by the Indians with great reverence. 
Among the plains tribes, the buffalo, on which 
they depended for food, shelter, and clothing, was 
sacred. Its skull was usually placed on the ground 
near the sweat lodge, prayers were made, and the 
pipe was offered to it, in a petition to the buffalo 
to remain with them, to be abundant, and even to 
run over smooth ground, so that their horses 
should not fall during the chase. If buffalo 
in general were sacred, how much more should 
the white one receive reverence. The Pawnees 
cherished their skins as sacred objects, and kept 
them in their medicine bundles, or used them to 
wrap about these bundles. The Blackfeet re- 
garded white buffalo as especially dedicated to the 
Sun, and hung up the white robe as a votive offer- 
ing to that deity. In the same way, the Chey- 
ennes, in old times, sacrificed the hide of a 
white buffalo to the Sun, although later, after 
their habits had been measurably changed by 



128 The Bison 

contact with the whites, they sometimes sold 
such robes. 

My friend George Bent — son of Col. William 
Bent, one of the historic characters of the early 
West — tells me that during a long course of trad- 
ing among the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, he has 
seen but five robes that could fairly be called 
white. One of these was silver-gray, another, 
white, a third, cream color, the fourth, dapple 
gray, and the fifth, yellowish fawn color. He tells 
me that in ancient times the white buffalo was 
regarded by the Cheyennes as sacred, and that, if 
one of them killed a white buffalo, he left it where 
it fell, taking nothing from it, and not even putting 
a knife into it. The Cheyennes believe that any 
white buffalo belongs far to the north, and comes 
from that region where, according to their tradi- 
tion, the buffalo originally came out of the ground. 

A great many years ago a war party of Chey- 
ennes went up north against the Crows. One day 
they came to a hill, and when they looked over it 
they saw before them great herds of buffalo lying 
down, and among them a cow, perfectly white. 
When the buffalo stood up to go to water, the 
white cow also stood up, and went with them, and 
it was observed that none of the other buffalo 



The Bison 129 

went very close to her. They did not appear to 
fear her, but they did not crowd close about her ; 
they gave her plenty of room, as if they respected 
her. This led the Cheyennes to think that the 
white buffalo was a chief among other buffalo. 

The women of the Cheyennes did not dress a 
white buffalo's hide. When occasion arose for 
such work, it was commonly done by some captive 
woman ; for example, a Kiowa, or a Pawnee, — 
some one who was not bound by Cheyenne cus- 
toms and Cheyenne fears. Rarely, a Cheyenne 
woman went through a certain ceremony, being 
prayed over by a medicine-man, and painted in 
a peculiar fashion ; this ceremony removed the 
tabu, and she might then dress the white robe. 

The habits of the buffalo were in most respects 
those of domestic cattle. They fed in loose herds 
as cattle do, the members of a family — that is 
to say, the old cow and her progeny, sometimes 
up to three or four years old — keeping together ; 
the old bulls, lazier, heavier, and less active than 
the cows and the younger stock, were usually 
on the outskirts of the herd, and if it was slowly 
moving in any direction, were likely to be behind. 
Much has been written concerning the intelligence 
of the buffalo, and the manner in which the bulls 



130 The Bison 

stood sentry over the herd, constantly on the 
watch for danger. There is not and never was 
any foundation for these stories, which were mere 
creations of the writer's imagination. As a mat- 
ter of fact, the cows were much more alert and 
watchful than the bulls, were always the first to 
detect danger and to move away from it, while the 
bulls were dull and slow, and often did not start 
to run until the herd at large was in full flight. 
Moreover, the cows and younger animals of the 
herd were much swifter than the bulls, and so 
pressed constantly to the front, while the bulls 
brought up the rear. The disposition of the 
males had nothing to do with any desire to pro- 
tect the herd, but resulted from the fact that they 
were slower than the others. The earlier writers 
on the habits of these and other animals, credited 
them with human motives and aspirations, which 
of course they do not possess. A somewhat simi- 
lar fashion of writing about animals is current at 
the present day, but is false and unnatural, and 
will pass. 

The hides of the buffalo are in their best 
condition in the early part of the winter, and it 
was the practice of the Indians to collect their 
robes at that time of the year, — namely, between 



The Bison 131 

November and January. Soon after January, 
however, the hair begins to grow loose, and it 
is shed during the spring and early summer, 
though often great patches cling to the body 
until late summer or early fall, I have seen 
buffalo in the month of July still clad in what 
looked like a loose robe, the old hair hanging to- 
gether in an almost complete mat, covering the 
body. Usually, however, by rubbing against trees, 
rocks, and banks of dirt, and by rolling on the 
prairie, the loose hair is got rid of by early summer. 
In very old animals the moult takes place later and 
less easily than in those in good condition, and 
sometimes old and lean buffalo do not seem to 
shed their coats completely. 

The rutting season begins in July and lasts 
about two months. During this time frequent 
battles take place among the bulls, apparently 
fierce on account of the size and activity of the 
combatants, but usually without important re- 
sults. These fights are much like similar con- 
tests between domestic bulls; they paw up the 
ground, kneel down and thrust their horns into 
the earth, mutter and bellow and grunt; but 
although they charge on each other with fury, 
and come together with a tremendous shock, the 



132 The Bison 

contest usually ends in nothing more important 
than the driving off, for a time, of the weaker 
bull. From their great activity at this season, 
the bulls rapidly lose flesh ; but after the rut is 
over, they regain it, so that by the beginning 
of the cold weather they, like the cows, are fat 
and in good order. 

The buffalo cow produces, usually, a single 
calf, which may be born during the months of 
March, April, May, or June. The usual time 
for the calves to be born is in April and May. 
Shortly before that time the mother separates 
herself from the herd, which, however, she rejoins 
not long after the birth of the calf. Like many 
other ruminants, the mother hides her calf when 
it is small and weak, but does not wander far from 
it. After it has gained some strength it joins 
other calves, and these usually keep together a 
little apart from the main herd, their mothers 
coming to them from time to time in order that 
they may nurse. 

When first born, the calves are reddish yellow 
in color, do not possess any noticeable hump, and 
look very much Hke ordinary domestic calves, 
except that possibly the tail is slightly shorter. 
Before very long, however, they commence to 



The Bison 133 

grow darker in color, and I have seen calves 
in August that at a little distance seemed almost 
as dark as the adult buffalo. 

The cow is devoted to her calf, and is ready 
to fight for it against any enemy except man. 
Usually, in the buffalo chase, the cow, thoroughly 
frightened, paid no attention to the calf. But, on 
the other hand, cases have occurred, where men 
have been capturing calves to rear in captivity, 
in which the cow refused to desert her offspring, 
but turned upon the captor of the calf and 
charged him with the utmost boldness. 

Colonel Dodge instances a case where a num- 
ber of bulls devoted themselves to protecting a 
calf against wolves. He says, " I have seen evi- 
dence of this many times, but the most remark- 
able instance I ever heard of was related to me 
by an army surgeon who was an eye-witness. 
He was one evening returning to camp after 
a day's hunt, when his attention was attracted 
by the curious actions of a little knot of six or 
eight buffalo. Approaching sufficiently near to 
see clearly, he discovered that this little knot 
were all bulls, standing in a close circle with 
their heads downward, while in a concentric 
circle, at some twelve or fifteen paces distant, 



134 The Bison 

sat, licking their chops in impatient expectancy, 
at least a dozen large gray wolves — except man, 
the most dangerous enemy of the buffalo. The 
doctor determined to watch the performance. 
After a few moments the knot broke up, still 
keeping in a compact mass, and started on a 
trot for the main herd some half mile off. To 
his very great astonishment, the doctor now 
saw that the central and controlling figure of 
this mass was a poor little calf, so newly born 
as scarcely to be able to walk. After going fifty 
or one hundred yards, the calf lay down ; the 
bulls disposed themselves in a circle as before, 
and the wolves, who had trotted along on each 
flank of their retreating supper, sat down and 
licked their chops again. This was repeated 
again and again, and although the doctor did not 
see the finale (it being late and the camp distant), 
he had no doubt that the noble fathers did their 
whole duty by their offspring, and carried it safely 
to the herd." 

We may imagine that this was an unusual 
occurrence ; at the same time, it is true that 
a group of buffalo, if one of their number is 
attacked or threatened by wolves while they 
are close together, will all rally to the general 



The Bison 135 

defence, and will stand by each other. But that 
the bulls make it their business to defend calves, 
or systematically preserve anything except their 
own skins, I do not believe. 

Few people who have seen the buffalo only 
in captivity, few even of those who have hunted 
them on the level plains, have any idea of the 
agility of this clumsy, heavy creature, or of 
the disposition that it shows to reach elevated 
points, so difficult of access that a horse might 
find it a hard matter to climb them. In old 
times, one might see buffalo ascending steeps 
that were nearly vertical ; or, on the other hand, 
throwing themselves down the sides of mountains 
so sharply sloping and rough that a horseman 
would not dare follow them. Like many other 
animals, wild and tame, they often liked to 
seek elevated points from which a wide view 
might be had, and I have found their tracks 
and other signs on points high up in the 
mountains, where only sheep or goats would 
be looked for. The mountain bison, so-called — 
and by many hunters regarded as a species quite 
distinct from the buffalo of the plains — was 
especially given to frequenting the peaks in sum- 
mer; no doubt in part to avoid the attacks of 



136 The Bison 

flies, but also in part — as I believe — from sheer 
love of climbing. 

Like most other herbivorous animals, the 
buffalo was subject to panics, and was easily 
stampeded, and when thoroughly frightened, a 
herd ran for a long way before stopping. When 
alarmed, they huddled together as closely as pos- 
sible, running in a dense mass. The result of 
this was that only the animals on the outskirts 
of the herd could see where they were going; 
those in the centre blindly followed their leaders 
and depended on them. This very fact was a 
source of danger, for the leaders, crowded upon 
by those that followed, even if they saw peril 
in front of them, could not stop, and often could 
not even turn aside, but were constantly forced 
on to a danger that they would gladly have 
avoided. This is the entirely simple explanation 
of a characteristic often wondered at by writers 
about this species ; that is, their habit of running 
headlong into danger, — plunging over cut banks 
into the pens prepared for them by the Indians, 
or rushing into quicksands or places where they 
mired down, or into deep water, which might 
have well been avoided, or even up against such 
obstacles as a train of cars or a steamboat in the 



The Bison 137 

river. The simple fact is that the animals which 
saw the danger were unable to avoid it on ac- 
count of the pressure from behind, and those that 
were pressing the leaders on were ignorant of the 
danger toward which they were rushing. 

I have already adverted to the popular but 
erroneous belief that the buffalo performed exten- 
sive migrations in spring and fall. This is not 
true. There were, unquestionably, certain sea- 
sonal movements east and west, and north and 
south, yet these movements were never very ex- 
tended, and constituted nothing more than the 
very general shiftings which are made by many 
ruminants between a summer and a winter range. 
Throughout the country lying between the Sas- 
katchewan and the Missouri River, the buffalo, in 
summer, moved up close to the mountains and 
even into the foot-hills; and at the coming of 
winter, with its snows and its bitter winds, they 
moved to the eastward aga.in, seeking the lower 
ground and such shelter as the ravines and buttes 
and timbered river valleys of the prairie might 
afford. 

On the other hand, buffalo, in their journeys to 
water, usually travelled to the nearest streams, and 
as on the plains the streams usually run from west 



138 The Bison 

to east, and the buffalo travelled in single file, their 
trails ran at right angles to the course of the 
rivers, or north and south. It is quite possible 
that the directions of these trails, deeply worn, 
and showing the passage of great numbers of ani- 
mals, may have given rise to the popular belief in 
this north and south migration. 

At the same time, it is true that the buffalo 
herds were more or less constantly in motion. 
As they were very numerous, it was obviously 
essential that they should move constantly, to 
reach fresh grazing grounds. Often, too, they 
were disturbed by hunters, red or white, who 
stampeded the herds, which then rushed off in a 
close mass, perhaps not to stop for ten or a dozen 
miles. Besides that, frequently, the prairie was 
burned, so that they were deprived of food, and 
long journeys must be made to reach fresh graz- 
ing grounds. 

Not very much is known, and very much less 
has been written concerning the tendency in ani- 
mals, wild and domestic, to confine themselves to 
particular localities ; yet all people who live much 
out of doors understand, even though they may 
not reason much about it, how very local in habit 
many birds and animals are. The ranchman, of 




PROTECTED 



The Bison 141 

course, knows that the horses and cattle which 
feed on his range divide themselves up into little 
bunches, each of which selects some special area 
where they spend all their time, rarely moving far 
from it, except to make journeys to water; or, at 
some change of the seasons, to migrate from sum- 
mer to winter range or back again. In domestic 
stock this attachment to locality is strongly 
marked, and it is a common thing for animals 
that have been driven to a range hundreds of 
miles distant from that on which they have been 
accustomed to feed, to travel back toward their 
old haunts as soon as they are turned loose. I 
have known cases where one-third of a large 
bunch of horses, driven to a new range four or 
five hundred miles away, were a year later gath- 
ered again on their old home range. It is a mat- 
ter of common experience for horses that escape 
from owners, travelling at a distance from the 
home range, to take the back trail and return 
to it. 

Among our larger game animals a similar con- 
dition of things prevails. White-tail deer are 
greatly attached to particular localities, and when 
undisturbed, confine their wanderings within 
very narrow limits. Even if thoroughly fright- 



142 The Bison 

ened, and driven to a considerable distance, they 
soon return. If an old white-tail buck is run 
with dogs, he may make a long chase, and cover 
a wide stretch of country, but to-morrow he will 
probably be found in his old home. In the same 
way, mule deer, mountain sheep, white goats, 
and antelope show their attachment for localities, 
and unless persistently disturbed, wander but 
little. 

The same thing is true with regard to non- 
migratory birds. Ruffed grouse attach them- 
selves to certain pieces of woodland, or to 
particular swamps, and the birds may be found 
there all through the season. In like manner, 
quail establish themselves on certain small 
pieces of ground, and after their haunts have 
been learned, may be started there with unfailing 
regularity. 

During many years' experience with big game, 
I have often had these facts thrust on my atten- 
tion, and have seen much to warrant the belief 
that, like other wild animals, the buffalo feels 
attachment for a particular range of country, 
which it does not desert except for good reason, 
or when the change from summer to winter, or 
back again, leads to a migration that may fairly 



The Bison 143 

be called seasonal. The buffalo's attachment to 
locality, and its natural inertia, is well exempli- 
fied by an experience of Major G. W. H. Stouch, 
U.S.A., retired, a veteran soldier of more than 
thirty-five years' experience on the plains, of which 
he told me many years ago. I give it as nearly 
as possible in his own words : — 

" In the fall of 1866 I was directed to proceed 
with Company C, Third Infantry, to reestablish 
old Fort Fletcher on the north fork of Big Creek, 
sixteen miles below the present Fort Hays, 
Kansas. When on October i6th we marched 
down to the site chosen, and went into camp, I 
noticed half a mile above us on the creek bottom 
a considerable herd of buffalo feeding ; there 
were perhaps eight or nine hundred of them. 
As soon as I saw them, it occurred to me that I 
would leave them undisturbed, and that so long 
as they remained there they might furnish us 
a supply of beef at very little cost of time or 
trouble. I therefore ordered the men not to 
hunt up the creek, or disturb these buffalo in 
any way, instructing them to do all their hunt- 
ing down the stream. 

" In order to put my idea in practice at once, 
I detailed one of the soldiers as hunter and 



144 T^^^ Bison 

butcher of the company, and told him to go up 
the creek and kill a buffalo, but not to show 
himself either before or after firing the shot — 
merely to kill a fat cow and then to remain un- 
der cover until I joined him with a wagon. He 
did so. At the report of the rifle the buffalo 
fired at ran a few steps, and then lay down, while 
those nearest to it made a few jumps, looked 
around, saw no one, and then went on feeding. 
From the camp we were watching the result of 
the shot, and as soon as fired, I went with a 
wagon to bring in the meat. As the wagon ap- 
proached the carcass, the nearest buffalo moved 
out of the way, without showing any special fear, 
and the wagon returned to camp with its load. 
This was repeated daily, the buffalo never being 
frightened either by the shot or the wagon, and 
seeming to become more tame as time went on, 
often approaching within a few hundred yards 
of where we were at work erecting the buildings. 
" About November ist, Troop E, Seventh 
Cavalry (under Lieutenant Wheelan) arrived to 
reinforce the post; and about November 19th 
Company B, Thirty-seventh Infantry (under Lieu- 
tenant Phelps) also arrived. I explained my 
plan of operation to these officers, and requested 



The Bison 145 

them to detail hunters from their companies, and 
to order their men to hunt down the creek, and 
not to disturb what I had come to regard as the 
post beef herd. They did so, and the herd still 
remained with us. 

" One morning in February, '67, a sergeant, 
whom I had sent the day before with a small 
detail to make a scout, rapped at my door, and 
reported his return. Among other things, he 
said : ' Lieutenant, I met our buffalo herd travel- 
ling up the creek, about fifteen miles from here. 
They were moving slowly; just feeding along.' 

" I determined to see if they could not be 
brought back, and taking twenty-five men (ac- 
companied by Lieutenant Cooke, Third Infantry, 
Adjutant, Assistant-Surgeon Fisk, and Mr. Hale, 
the post trader) rode up the creek, and entered the 
valley above the herd. Then, forming a skirmish 
line across the bottom, we very slowly advanced 
toward the buffalo. When they first noticed us, 
the leaders seemed uncertain what to do ; but as 
they had been accustomed to seeing large parties 
of us, instead of running, as I feared they might, 
they at length turned about and began slowly to 
work backward in the direction from which they 
had come. By nightfall the herd was on its old 



146 The Bison 

feeding ground, and there we left it, and there it 
remained until spring, and would, no doubt, have 
remained longer, but, unluckily, the Seventh Cav- 
alry, under General Custer, rode in upon it, as 
they came down the creek to the post for sup- 
plies, after their unsuccessful chase after the 
Cheyennes, who had run away from General 
Hancock. General Custer detailed two troops 
with orders to secure meat for the command. 
After chasing it, and killing forty-four head, the 
herd was scattered, and never returned. The 
herd supplied the post (consisting of about three 
hundred officers and men) with fresh beef from 
October 16, 1866, until about April 20, 1867." 

The buffalo calf, when captured very young, 
was easily tamed. Indeed, nothing more was 
needed at times than to permit the calf to suck 
the fingers for a moment or two, when it would 
follow the rider into camp, and seemed to be 
wholly without fear of man. As already stated, 
when very young it is hidden by its mother, and, 
like the young of deer, elk, antelope, and other 
ruminants, it can then be captured, and makes 
no effort to escape. This, by many writers, has 
been denounced as stupidity and dulness. As 
a matter of fact, it is merely following out the 



The Bison 147 

protective instinct which is common to the young 
of many large mammals, at a time when they are 
without weapons for self-protection, and without 
strength or speed to save themselves by flight. 

At various times during the last two hundred 
years, attempts have been made to domesticate 
the buffalo, and with entire success. But these 
attempts have never been continued long enough 
to be productive of any economic results. Never- 
theless, buffalo were kept in captivity from the 
beginning of the eighteenth century, and toward 
the end of that century were actually domesti- 
cated, bred, and crossed with domestic cattle in 
Virginia, and somewhat later in Kentucky. The 
very full account given to Mr. Audubon by Mr. 
Robert Wycliff, of Lexington, Kentucky, in 1843, 
has often been quoted, and all the experiments 
since made have confirmed the conclusions then 
stated. It was proved, and is now well known, 
that the buffalo, in domestication, are easily 
handled, respect fences, and are but little more 
difficult to control than domestic cattle ; that the 
male buffalo crosses readily with the domestic 
cow; that the progeny of the two species are 
fertile with either species and among themselves. 
It has also been demonstrated that the cross-bred 



148 The Bison 

animal is larger than either parent, and so makes 
a better beef animal. Besides, its hide yields a 
robe which, if not equal to that of the buffalo, is, 
at least, vastly superior to the hide of the ordinary 
beef. More important than either the beef or the 
robe, is the very greatly increased hardiness of the 
cross-bred animal, which enables it to endure ex- 
tremes of cold and snow, which would destroy 
the ordinary domestic cattle. 

From the days of Robert Wycliff, almost to the 
time when Mr. C. J. Jones, of Kansas, began experi- 
ments in breeding buffalo, little or nothing had 
been done in this direction. A few years earlier 
Mr. S. L. Bedson, of Stony Mountain, Mani- 
toba, set to work at the same problem, and both 
men met with abundant measure of success. Both 
bred pure buffalo in considerable numbers, and 
both succeeded in breeding the buffalo with the 
domestic cow, and securing a progeny which was 
remarkable for size and for the robes produced. 
Indeed, Mr. Hornaday quotes Mr. Bedson as say- 
ing that the three-quarter bred animal produces 
" an extra good robe which will readily bring 
forty to fifty dollars in any market where there 
is a demand for robes." 

It is altogether possible that the time for 



The Bison 149 

establishing a race of buffalo cattle has past. 
The buffalo are extinct, and the number of ani- 
mals in captivity to be drawn on, very small. 
Nevertheless, the great preponderance of bulls 
among these domesticated buffalo, makes it pos- 
sible that something in this direction might be 
done, though the chances now are much against it. 

The buffalo has often been broken to the yoke. 
Robert Wycliff says of this animal, " He walks 
more actively, and I think has more strength 
than an ox of the same weight. I have broken 
them to the yoke and found them capable of 
making excellent oxen ; and for drawing wagons, 
carts, or other heavily laden vehicles on long 
journeys, they would, I think, be greatly prefer- 
able to the common ox." Under the yoke, how- 
ever, they are said to be somewhat difHcult to 
control, and cases are cited where broken buffalo 
have, for various causes, run away, to the great 
detriment of the load they were hauling. In the 
year 1874 a settler on Trail Creek, in Montana, 
told me that he had a pair of bulls broken to the 
yoke, and declared that they would haul more 
than " any two yoke of cattle on the place." 

There is another reason besides the lack of 
buffalo for thinking that no systematic attempt 



i^o The Bison 

to cross these animals with domestic cattle will 
ever be attempted. The days of free ranging, 
where the cattle are turned out on the prairie to 
look after themselves, winter and summer, are 
almost over, and year by year the area of the free 
range is becoming more and more contracted. 
The advantages of great size and a valuable robe 
would still be an attraction to the farmer ; but the 
hardiness which enables the half-breed animal to 
endure almost any winter weather will soon cease 
to be required, because the cattle of almost all 
the western country will be kept under fence, and 
fed on hay during the winter. 

From time immemorial the buffalo furnished 
food to the Indians, and with the coming into the 
land of the white man it supported him also. 
What the primitive method was by which the 
Indians hunted buffalo we do not know, but at 
the time the redmen became known to the 
whites, when they were footmen, the only 
method of securing this animal was by the sur- 
round, or by driving it into pens from which the 
buffalo could not escape, and where they were 
easily destroyed. Such pens were built at the 
foot of cut bluffs or low cliffs, over which the 
buffalo were driven ; or, in the more open and 



The Bison 151 

flat country, where ravines with steep sides were 
not found, a long fenced causeway was often 
built, on which the buffalo were driven, and 
when reaching its end, the leaders, by reason of 
the pressure of those behind, were forced to jump 
into the pen, and the others followed, until all 
were captured. Often, if the drive was made 
over a high bluff, the fall killed many of the 
beasts, and even when this did not take place, 
many of the younger and weaker animals were 
destroyed by their fellows in the tremendous 
crush which took place within the pen. 

No sooner did the buffalo find themselves con- 
fined, than they began to race about the en- 
closure, and the men standing on the logs which 
formed its sides, shot them with their stone- 
headed arrows as they ran by, until at length all 
had fallen. 

The principle of the foot surround was not 
different from this. When a herd of buffalo 
was found, the Indians waited for a day when 
the wind did not blow, and then, creeping toward 
the buffalo, they surrounded them on all sides. 
When the line was fairly complete, one man 
would show himself, and perhaps frighten the 
buffalo by waving his robe at them. They 



152 The Bison 

would start to run, when the men stationed at 
the point of the circle toward which they were 
directing their course would show themselves, 
toss their robes in the air, and turn them in 
another direction. Thus, whichever way they 
ran, they found people standing before them, and 
soon they began to run around in a circle within 
the ring of men, and continued to do this until 
they became exhausted. Little by little the men 
drew closer together, making the circle smaller, 
and soon the buffalo were running near enough 
to them for them to be shot by their arrows. 

It did not always happen that the hunt was 
successful. Sometimes in the pen a strong bull 
might find a place where no one was standing, 
and might leap over the barrier, or at least leap 
on it, throwing his whole weight against it. Very 
likely he would be followed by others, and per- 
haps a number would succeed in surmounting 
the wall ; or they might even break it down, and 
then the whole herd would stream out of the pen 
and be lost. Sometimes, too, in the surround, 
especially if the herd of buffalo was large, it was 
found impossible to turn them, and they would 
break their way through the ring of men. In 
like manner, when, as sometimes happened, the 



The Bison 153 

Indians set up their lodges all about the herd, 
the buffalo might yet find a way to break through 
and escape. 

If, however, all went well, and a good part of 
the herd was killed, there was great rejoicing all 
through the camp. Everybody was happy, since 
now, for some days, food would be abundant, 
and every one would have enough to eat; and 
there is nothing that the Indian dreads so much 
as hunger. 

Later, after the Indians obtained horses and 
iron-pointed arrows, and, later still, repeating 
rifles, these old methods were all given up. It 
was easier to chase the buffalo on horseback, and 
their packhorses gave them a ready means for 
bringing the spoils of the chase back to the camp. 
Now, too, they used the lance in hunting, driving 
the horse close up on the buffalo's right side, 
holding the lance across the body, and, with a 
mighty two-handed thrust, sending the keen steel 
deep into the animal's vitals. 

Perhaps no more exciting scene could be wit- 
nessed than one of the old-time buffalo chases by 
the Indians. Naked themselves, they rode their 
naked horses, carrying their quivers of arrows on 
t]ieir backs or by their sides, and their bows in 



154 The Bison 

their hands. The good buffalo horses were swift 
of foot to catch the cow, admirably trained for 
running over the rough prairie, often dangerous 
from badger holes or burrows of the prairie dog, 
and knowing how to approach the buffalo, and 
also how to avoid its charge — trained, in fact, 
just as well as the cow-pony is trained, which 
knows exactly what is expected of him when 
he is cutting cattle out of a bunch. The chase 

^was conducted in silence, and the only sound 
heard was the rumble of a thousand hoofs — dull 

1 where the ground was soft, and sharp if it hard- 
ened. If the herd was large, the scene was one 
of great confusion. Buffalo and horses with their 
riders were dimly seen amid the cloud of dust 
thrown up by the fleeing herd. Horses were 
constantly overtaking the buffalo, riders were 
bending down, horses were sheering off, buffalo 
were falling. The old bulls, passed by the swift 
riders, were turning off and fleeing, singly or in 
little groups, to right and to left, while the swifter 
cows, with heads down and tails in air, were press- 
ing forward in flight to escape the Indians, who 
were riding with their rearmost ranks. 

Not greatly differing from this, save that guns 
were used and there was much yelling and noise, 



The Bison 155 

were the hunts of the wild Red River half-breeds. 
These were pursued on horseback, and the men 
were armed with the old Hudson Bay smooth- 
bore flint-lock guns. Powder was carried in a 
horn and balls in the mouth. When he had 
discharged his gun, the hunter poured the powder 
from the horn directly into the barrel, guessing 
at the quantity, slipped a ball from the mouth 
into the barrel, the gun was given a jar on the 
saddle to settle the load, a little priming was 
poured into the pan, and he was ready for 
another shot. 

On such hunts the Red River half-breeds 
transported their families and their property 
almost entirely in the well-known Red River 
carts, each drawn by a single horse, and con- 
taining, besides a load of baggage, a woman and 
perhaps two or three children. 

Besides these wholesale methods of taking 
buffalo, of course they were killed singly by men 
who crept close enough to them to drive even a 
stone-headed arrow deep enough into the sides to 
reach the life. Often, when the buffalo were in 
situations where it was impossible to approach 
them, men disguised as wolves crept in among 
the herd, and killed buffalo with their arrows. 



156 The Bison 

Catlin and others have described and figured this 
method of approach, which at the present day is 
traditional only among the Indians; yet an old 
friend, who died a few years ago, almost a hun- 
dred years old, has told me that he had many 
times killed buffalo in this way, either alone or 
in company with some Indian friend. 

Indians and half-breeds alike preserved the 
flesh of the buffalo by drying it. The strips or 
wide flakes of meat were cut about one-quarter 
of an inch thick and hung on scaffolds exposed 
to sun and air. In a day or two the meat was 
thoroughly dried, when it was bent into proper 
lengths, and either tied in bundles or done up in 
parfleches. It was from this dried meat that the 
well-known pemmican was made. The dried 
meat was roasted over a fire of coals, and then 
broken up by pounding with sticks on a hide, or 
by pounding between two stones. This pulver- 
ized flesh was mixed with the melted fat of the 
buffalo, and after the whole mass had been thor- 
oughly stirred, was packed in sacks made of 
buffalo skin, which were then sewed up with 
sinew, and as the mass gradually cooled the sack 
became hard, and would keep for a very long 
time. 



The Bison 157 

The killing of buffalo, as described, was in no 
sense sport ; instead, it was work of the hardest 
kind. The swift ride over the dry plains through 
the clouds of dust, the killing of the buffalo, and 
finally the cutting up of the animals was physical 
labor far harder than most of that performed by 
civilized man. Usually, the buffalo were killed 
far from water, and the severe work that the man 
had been doing and the summer heat made him 
very thirsty. It is not strange, then, that he 
slaked his thirst by devouring the liver, sprinkled 
with gall, or by eating raw the gelatinous nose of 
the buffalo. 

. The description of a butchering, given by Au- 
dubon in his " Missouri River Journal," is very 
graphic, and is worth quoting here : — 

" The moment that the buffalo is dead, three 
or four hunters, their faces and hands often cov- 
ered with gunpowder, and with pipes lighted, 
place the animal on its belly, and, by drawing out 
each fore and hind leg, fix the body so that it 
cannot fall again ; an incision is made near the 
root of the tail, immediately above the root in 
fact, and the skin cut to the neck, and taken off 
in the roughest manner imaginable, downward 
and on both sides at the same time. The knives 



158 The Bison 

are going in all directions, and many wounds 
occur in the hands and fingers, but are rarely 
attended to at this time. The pipe of one man 
has perhaps given out, and with his bloody hands 
he takes the one of his nearest companion, who 
has his own hands equally bloody. Now one 
breaks in the skull of the bull, and with bloody 
fingers draws out the hot brains and swallows 
them with peculiar zest ; another has now 
reached the liver, and is gobbling down enor- 
mous pieces of it ; while perhaps a third, who 
has come to the paunch, is feeding luxuriously 
on some — to me — disgusting-looking offal. 
But the main business proceeds. The flesh is 
taken off from the sides of the boss, or hump 
bones, from where these bones begin to the very 
neck, and the hump itself is thus destroyed. 
The hunters gave the name of ' hump ' to the 
mere bones when slightly covered by flesh ; and 
it is cooked, and is very good when fat, young, 
and well broiled. The pieces of flesh taken 
from the sides of these bones are called filets, 
and are the best portion of the animal when 
properly cooked. The forequarters, or shoulders, 
are taken off, as well as the hind ones, and the 
sides, covered by a thin portion of flesh, called 



The Bison 159 

the depouille, are taken out. Then the ribs are 
broken off at the vertebrae, as well as the boss 
bones. The marrow-bones, which are those of 
the fore and hind legs only, are cut out last. 
The feet usually remain attached to these ; the 
paunch is stripped of its covering of layers of fat, 
the head and backbone are left to the wolves. 
The pipes are all emptied, the hands, faces, and 
clothes all bloody, and now a glass of grog is 
often enjoyed, as the stripping off the skin and 
flesh of three or four animals is truly very hard 
work. . . . When the wind is high, and the buf- 
faloes run toward it, the hunters' guns often snap, 
and it is during their exertions to replenish their 
pans that the powder flies and sticks to the mois- 
ture every moment accumulating on their faces ; 
but nothing stops these daring and usually pow- 
erful men, who, the moment the chase is ended, 
leap from their horses, let them graze, and begin 
their butcher-like work." 

The Indian and the half-breed killed the buf- 
falo for their support, — for food, clothing, shelter, 
and many of their implements. The civilized 
buffalo skinner exterminated it for its hides. 
There was another class which did something 
toward wiping out the buffalo, yet the numbers 



i6o The Bison 

killed by them were inconsiderable in comparison 
with those killed for commercial purposes. This* 
class comprised those who ran buffalo for sport. 
Buffalo-running was not a difficult art, nor es- 
pecially exciting, except so far as it is exciting 
to chase and overtake some creature that is try- 
ing to escape. Provided a man had a good 
horse and was fairly accustomed to riding, there 
was little difficulty and little danger in the buffalo 
chase. At the same time, the combination of the 
swift ride, the rough country, the dust and dirt 
thrown up by the flying herd, and the close prox- 
imity of the great beasts have reduced many a 
buffalo runner on his first chase to a pitch of 
nervousness which made him do precisely the 
wrong thing. There have been cases, not a few, 
where riders, trying to kill buffalo with a pistol, 
have shot their own horses instead of the buffalo ; 
and at least one case came to my knowledge 
where the excited hunter, riding up on the right 
instead of the left side of the bull, and shooting 
across his own body, managed to shoot himself 
in the left arm. 

There was something rather exhilarating in 
the headlong ride after buffalo, a game not un- 
like "follow my leader," which boys play, where 



The Bison i6i 

the leader chooses the roughest and most difficult 
ground over which he can pass, and the follower 
is obliged to take the same route. But buffalo- 
hunting is now a sport of the distant past, and it 
is needless to speak of it at any length. 

In the days of its abundance the buffalo was a 
most impressive species, and their enormous num- 
bers have been a theme on which many writers 
have delighted to linger. Adjectives have failed 
them to describe the multitudes of buffalo seen, 
and it was not unusual for men to travel long 
distances among great herds, which made slow 
way for them as they passed along. Many cal- 
culations have been made of the numbers of 
buffalo seen at one time ; but, after all, these 
can be little more than guesswork. Terms like 
thousands and millions, so commonly used, have 
little or no meaning, for we have no standard of 
comparison by which to measure them. All the 
earlier writers, however graphic their descriptions 
of their numbers, fail to impress the reader, be- 
cause no one could comprehend such numbers 
except by seeing them. Dr. Allen, Mr. Horna- 
day. Colonel Dodge, and many of the old explor- 
ers, give much matter bearing on this subject. 
A few lines from the Journal of Alexander Henry 



1 62 The Bison 

give some idea of their numbers on the Red 
River. He says, under date of September i8, 
1800: " I took my usual morning view from the 
top of my oak, and saw more buffalo than ever. 
They formed one body, commencing about half a 
mile from camp, whence the plain was covered 
on the west side of the river as far as the eye 
could reach. They were moving slowly south- 
ward, and the meadow seemed as if in motion. 
This afternoon I rode a few miles up Park River. 
The few spots of wood along it have been rav- 
aged by buffalo ; none but the large trees are 
standing, the barks of which are rubbed perfectly 
smooth, and heaps of wool and hair lie at the 
foot of the trees. The small wood and brush 
are entirely destroyed, and even the grass is not 
permitted to grow in the points of the wood. 
The bare ground is more trampled by these cat- 
tle than the gate of the farm yard." 

Even in recent times one might journey for 
days at a time through herds, which to the eye 
seemed absolutely to cover a blackened prairie, 
and I myself have travelled for weeks through the 
Northwest without, at any time during the day, 
being out of sight of buffalo. How many millions 
there were in the great herds through which we 



The Bison 163 

used to pass, it is useless now to compute. They 
have all gone. But over a vast extent of the 
western country they have left memorials still 
visible and long to endure in the deep trails 
which furrow the prairie in all directions. 

Other mementos still to be seen, and stirring 
the heart of the old-timer, though to the man of 
to-day they are without a meaning, are the huge 
erratic boulders which lie here and there over 
the prairie where they were dropped by the great 
ice mass in its passage down from the highland. 
Against such boulders the buffalo used to rub 
their bodies, and such masses of granite or of 
fiinty quartzite, polished and with their sharp 
angles worn away by the rubbing against them 
of the tough hides, may often be seen. About 
such a rock, deep worn in the ground, is the 
trench, where the bulls and the cows and the 
younger animals once marched as they pushed 
their sides against the hard rock, their hoofs 
cutting the soil into fine dust to be blown away 
by the wind. The angles of these old rubbing- 
■stones are still discolored by the grease left on 
them from the buffalo's skins, and looking at 
them, one might fancy that they had been used 
only yesterday. 



164 The Bison 

Here, then, are monuments of imperishable 
granite, fashioned by a race of dumb creatures, 
and telHng to him who can read their sculpturing 
a long story of life and power and multitude for- 
ever gone. From earliest time man has set up 
all over the earth his enduring memorials to hold 
the wonder of later ages ; but of the races of 
the beasts, which one has done this, save only the 
bison ? 



The Bison 165 

AMERICAN BISON 

(Bos BISON 1) 

The great elevation of the fore quarters, the 
mass of long hair clothing the head, shoulders, 
and fore part of the body, together with the pecul- 
iar form of the head and horns, the latter of which 
are cylindrical, serve at once to distinguish the 
bison from the other members of the ox tribe. 
Some of the points distinguishing the American 
bison from its European cousin are that the mass 
of hair on the fore quarters is longer, the form 
of the skull is different, the horns are shorter, 
thicker, blunter, and more sharply curved. In 
the skull of the American animal the sockets 
of the eyes have a more tubular form. 

Height at shoulder about 6 feet ; weight from 
15 to 20 hundredweight; an adult bull weighed 
by W. T. Hornaday scaled 1727 pounds. 

Distribution. — The greater portion of western 
North America, ascending to the Great Slave Lake, 
and descending to New Mexico and Texas ; now 
nearly exterminated. American writers recognize 
two races (or species), the prairie bison {B. bison 
typicus) and the larger wood bison {B. bison atha- 
bascce) of the forest highlands of the northwest. 

1 " Records of Big Game," Rowland Ward, third edition. 



i66 



The Bison 



Measurements of Horns 



Length 

ON 

Outside 
Curve 


Circum- 
ference 


Tip to 
Tip 


Widest 
Inside 
Spread 


Locality 


Owner 


-2li 


i5i 




35 
outside 


Northern 
Montana 


W. F. Sheard 


20| 


15 




304 


Wyoming 


Hon. F. 
Thellusson 


-20^ 


i6i 


3Z\ 




? 


W. H. Root 


-19 


12\ 






Western 
Montana 


P. Liebinger 


18J 


Hi 




16I 


Western 
Montana 


The late 

J. S. Jameson 


-i8i 


14 


26J 


29 


Sioux Country 


Sir Greville 
Smyth, Bart. 


-18 


14 






Montana 


F. Sauter 


1 71 


I2f 


i5i 




? 


H.R.H. the 
Duke of Saxe- 
Coburg and 
Gotha 


-i7i 


I2i 






Southwestern 
Montana 


Theodore 
Roosevelt 


i7i 


12 




254 


Wyoming 


H.R.H. le Due 
d'Orleans 


i7i 


134 


21 




? 


Viscount 

Powerscourt 


i7i 


"1 


lOf 


i7i 


? 


British Museum 


-17 


14 


i7i 




Yellowstone, 
Montana 


Count E. Hoyos 


i6f 


Hi 


24 




Bighorn Mts., 
Wyoming 


Moreton 
Frewen 


ii6^ 


I2i 


I9f 




Colorado 


Sir Edmund G. 
Loder, Bart. 


I6i 


i3i 


I4i 


. . 


? 


Duke of 
Portland 


i6i 


15I 


25f 




Colorado 


Sir Edmund G. 
Loder, Bart. 


i5i 


I4l 




I9f 


Wyoming 


St. George 
Littledale 


-15.8 


12.14 


15 




Indian Terri- 
tory, near Texas 


Prince Henry of 
Liechtenstein 


14 




I2i 




North Park, 
Colorado 


Col. Ralph 
Vivian 


I3i 


I3i 


174 




? 


G. Wrey 


13I 


12 






? 


Hon. Walter 
Rothschild 



Wood Bison. 



THE MOUNTAIN SHEEP: HIS WAYS 

By Owen Wister 




ROCKY MOUNTAIN SHEEP 



THE MOUNTAIN SHEEP: 
HIS WAYS 

Upon a Sunday morning, the loth of July 
1892, I awaked among my scanty yet entan- 
gling Pullman blankets, and persuaded the broken- 
springed window-shade of my lower berth to slide 
upward sufificiently for a view of Livingston, 
Montana. Outside I beheld with something 
more than pleasure a fat and flourishing moun- 
tain ram. He was tethered to a telegraph pole, 
and he scanned with an indifference bred by 
much familiarity our sleeping-car, which had 
come from St. Paul, being dropped last night 
from the coast-bound train, because it was this 
morning to trundle its load of tourists up the 
Yellowstone Park branch to Cinnabar. The 
ram had been looking at Eastern tourists and 
their cars long enough for the slow gaze of his 
eye to express not a kindred but the same con- 
tempt which smouldered in the stare of the 
Indians at Custer station, of the cow punchers 

171 



172 The Mountain Sheep 

at Billings, of every Rocky Mountain creature, 
indeed, beneath whose observation the Eastern 
tourist passes. Dear reader, go stand opposite 
the lion at the zoo if you don't know what I 
mean. So patent was the stigma cast that it 
fantastically came into my head to step down and 
explain to the animal that I was not a tourist, 
that I had hunted and slain members of his 
species before now, and should probably do so 
again. And while thus I sat speculating among 
the Pullman blankets, the ram leaped irrelevantly 
off the earth, waved his fore legs, came down, ran 
a tilt at the telegraph pole as though at a quintain, 
and the next instant was grazing serene on the 
flat with an air of having had no connection 
whatever with the late disturbance. 

What had started him off like that } Extreme 
youth ? No ; for when I came to hear about 
him, he was five years old — a maturity corre- 
sponding in us men to about thirty. It was 
simply his own charming temperament. No 
locomotive had approached ; moreover for loco- 
motives he, as I was later to observe, did not 
care a hang ; no citizen old or young of either 
sex had given him offence ; nor was there stir of 
any kind in Livingston, Montana, this fine early 



The Mountain Sheep 173 

Sunday morning. When I presently stood on 
the platform, only the wind was blowing down 
from the sunny snow-fields, and that not bleakly, 
while from high invisible directions came thinly 
a pleasant tankling of cow-bells. 

Not two minutes had I been on the platform 
when the ram did it again. Yes, it was merely 
his charming temperament ; and often since, 
very often, when encompassed with ponderous 
acquaintance, have I envied him his blithe and 
relaxing privilege. I was now thankful to learn 
that the branch train had still some considerable 
time to wait for the train from Tacoma, before it 
could take me from the ram's company; no such 
good chance to watch a live healthy mountain 
sheep on his own native heath was likely again 
to be mine, and after breakfast I sought his 
owner at once. 

" It's a fine dy," said the owner. 

" And a very fine ram," I assured him. 

" He's quite tyme," the owner went on. " You 
can have him for five hundred." 

"You're a long way from London," was my 
comment; and he asked if I, too, were English. 
But I was not, nor had I any wish to bear away 
the ram, skipping and leaping into civilization. 



174 The Mountain Sheep 

Three hundred pounds would, I suppose, 
have been a Httle heavier than he was, but not 
much ; he stood near as high as my waist, and 
he had at some period of his long, long ancestry 
marched across to us from Asia upon his lengthy 
un-sheeplike legs — skipped over the icy straits 
before Adam (let alone Behring) was in the 
world, and while the straits themselves waited for 
the splitting sea to break the bridge of land be- 
tween Kamchatka and Alaska. This is the 
best guess which science can make concerning 
our sheep's mysterious origin. Upon our soil, 
none of nature's graveyards hold his bones pre- 
served until late in the geological day; earlier 
than the glacial period neither he nor his equally 
anomalous comrade, the white goat, would seem 
to have been with us ; and we may comfortably 
suppose that sheep and goat took up their jour- 
ney together and came over the great old 
Aleutian bridge which Behring found later in 
fragments. Having landed up there in the well- 
nigh Polar north, they skipped their way east 
and south among our Pacific and Rocky Moun- 
tains, until, by the time we ourselves came over 
to live in the North American continent, they 
had — the sheep especially — spread themselves 



The Moimtain Sheep 175 

widely, and were occupying a handsome domain 
when we met them. 

" Among other things we procured two horns 
of the animal . . . known to the Mandans by 
the name of ahsahta . . . winding like those 
of a ram." 

This, so far as I know, is the first word of the 
mountain sheep recorded by an American. Thus 
wrote Lewis on December the twenty-second, 
1804, being then in winter camp with the Mandan 
Indians, not many miles up the river from where 
to-day the Northern Pacific's bridge joins Bis- 
marck to Mandan. We find him again, on the 
twenty-fifth of the May following, when he has 
proceeded up the Missouri a little beyond the 
Musselshell, writing, " In the course of the day 
we also saw several herds of the big-horned 
animals among the steep cliffs on the north, and 
killed several of them ; " as to which one of his 
fellow explorers correctly comments in his own 
record, " But they very little resemble sheep, 
except in the head, horns, and feet." It is not 
worth while to quote a later reference made when 
the party was near the Dearborn River, north, 
sixty miles or so, of where now stands the town 
of Helena. 



176 The Mountain Sheep 

Thus it is to be seen that Meriwether Lewis, 
private secretary to President Jefferson and 
commander of that great expedition, met the 
mountain sheep in Dakota, and from there to 
the Rocky Mountains grew familiar with him; 
though not so famihar as to prevent his later 
making a confusion between sheep and goats, 
which, being handed down, delayed for many 
years a clear knowledge of these animals. To 
this I shall return when goats are in ques- 
tion. 

Until very lately, until the eighties, that is to 
say, sheep were still to be found in plenty where 
Meriwether Lewis found them among the Bad 
Lands of Dakota ; and they dwelt in most ranges 
of the Western mountains from Alaska to Sonora. 
They had not taken to the peaks exclusively 
then; the great table-land was high enough for 
them. I very well recall a drive in July, 1885, 
when, from the wagon in which I sat, I saw a 
little band of them watching us pass, in a country 
of sage-brush and buttes so insignificant as not to 
figure as hills upon the map. That was between 
Medicine Bow and the Platte River. To meet 
the bighorn there to-day would be a very ex- 
traordinary circumstance ; and as for Dakota, 





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ALERT— (Ow5 itow^O 



The Mountain Sheep 179 

there too has civiHzation arrived ; and you will 
find divorces commoner than sheep — and less 
valuable. 

It is Gass whom I have cited above as to the 
scant likeness between this wild so-called sheep 
and the usual sheep of our experience; and it 
was Gass whose word I remembered this Sun- 
day morning at Livingston, while I stood taking 
my fill of observation. The ram, as his owner 
had assured me, was in all truth quite " tyme " ; 
and you could examine him as near as you 
wished. I took hold of his rope and pulled him 
to me, and rubbed his nose. Like a sheep.? 
I have already spoken of his long legs. I now 
looked him over carefully for a sign of anything 
in the nature of fleece. There was no sign. 
Short hair, in texture not unlike the antelope's 
and in color not far from that gray we see in 
fishing-line, covered him close and thick. Upon 
his neck and shoulders it merged with a very 
light reddish brown, and on his rump it became 
a patch much lighter, though not white. In fact, 
the hue of his coat varied subtly all over him ; 
and I am tempted to remark in this connection 
that in describing the color of wild animals most 
of us have been apt to make our assertions far 



i8o The Mountain Sheep 

too rigid. Animals there are, of course, com- 
pletely white, or black, and so forth ; but many, 
the more you scrutinize them, the more reveal 
gradations, as this ram did ; gray fishing-tackle 
is only a rough impression of his tint upon the 
loth of July; on December the ist of that same 
year I saw him again, and his hair had darkened 
to something like a Maltese cat's. Furthermore, 
I have seen other sheep in summer that struck 
me, some as lighter, and some as darker, than the 
gray of fishing-tackle. And what, shall we infer, 
do these variations import? Adjustments to 
climate and environment, state of the individual's 
age and health, or several distinct species of 
sheep } I think I should be shy of the last in- 
ference unless I were prepared to accept a differ- 
ence in the color of the eyes and hair of two 
brothers as being a basis sufficient to class them 
as separate subspecies of man. It is a dear 
thought to many of us that some mountain, some 
lake, some river, some street, or even (rather than 
nothing at all) some alley, shall be labelled with 
our name, and thus bear it down the ages ; and 
from this very human craving our zoologists are 
not wholly exempt; but I have been taught to 
doubt that of the mountain sheep, the Ovis cana- 



The Mountain Sheep i8i 

densts ^ (or Ovis cervina, as some books still have 
it), more than one or two subdivisions will prove, 
in the end, valid enlargements of our knowledge. 
These are Ovis dalli^ a white variety in central 
Alaska, north of latitude 60°, and (perhaps) Ovis 
stoneif a dark variety with horns more slender 
and outward curving, in Alaska and North British 
Columbia. The four other would-be subspecies 
have been set down as Ovis canadensis audu- 
doni, Ovis nelsoni,^ Ovis mexicana^ and Ovis 

^ Dark brown, shading to tan and ecru, tinged witli grayisli blue; 
large, heavy boned ; massive horns curved close to head, well flat- 
tened, deeply corrugated on upper rim, usually battered at the points 
in the older rams. Range the Rocky Mountains north from the 
Colorado River to the head waters of the Peace River, British 
Columbia. Range in upper edge of timber line. 

2 White. Summer coat of a rusty hue. Not so large as Cana- 
densis. Horns white, curved well away from head ; not so deeply 
corrugated, less massive than Canadensis. All of Rocky Mountains 
north of 60° N. L., and Alaskan Mountains in Western Alaska Range, 
above timber line. 

^ The darkest of all the sheep, shading from light to very dark 
gray tinged with brown. Horns long and graceful but slender, 
spreading farther from the head than those of any species. Range 
the Rocky Mountains between 55° and 60° N. and in the Cassiar, 
Campbell, and Simson mountains farther west and north to 62° N. 

* Light brown to ecru tinged with drab. Horns similar to Cana- 
densis. Range the semi-desert country in Southern states from 
Texas to California. 

^ Darker than N'elsoni, but not so dark as Canadensis. Size 
large. Horns broad and massive ; molar teeth larger than in any 
known American sheep ; tail vertebra long. Range Chihuahua 
Mountains in Northern and Western Mexico. 



1 82 The Mountain Sbeep 

fannini} These four may be considered not so 
much varieties of sheep as works of fiction. 

As to the general name, all are agreed to let 
him pass conveniently as a sheep, — conveniently, 
but with a number of reserves which science can 
state. He has, for instance, some things in com- 
mon with the goat family. Indeed, science can, 
in final analysis, hardly separate sheep from goat. 
Relatives in this continent our Ovis possesses 
absolutely none ; but there are cousins to be 
found in Kamchatka, Tibet, and India; and 
I have been told by one hunter that the moufflon 
of Corsica resembles him not a little. I've for- 
gotten to mention that he hasn't any tail to 
speak of. So now at length, you, who have 
never looked upon him, see him, if you can, 
through my unscientific vision, as I rubbed his 
nose at Livingston, Montana: tall almost as a 
deer, shaped almost like a heavy black-tail deer, 
close haired, grayish, tailless, with unexpected 
ram's horns curving round his furry ears and 
forward, with eyes dark yellow and grave, and 
with the look of a great gentleman in every line 

1 White and gray. In size about that of the Dalli and Stotiei. 
Horns white ; curved closer to head than Dalli and Stonei. Range 
Upper Yukon River. Range more in the timber than Stonei or 
Dalli ; habits very much those of Canadensis. 



The Mountain Sheep 183 

of him. The tame sheep is hopelessly bourgeois ; 
but this mountain aristocrat, this frequenter 
of clean snow and steep rocks and silence, has, 
even beyond the bull elk, that same secure, un- 
conscious air of being not only well bred, but 
high bred, not only game but fine game, which 
we still in the twentieth century meet sometimes 
among men and women. What gives distinc- 
tion } Who can say ? It is to be found among 
chickens and fish. What preserves it we know ; 
and our laws will in the end extirpate it. Many 
people already fail to recognize it, either in life 
or in books. But nature scorns universal suf- 
frage ; and when our houses have ceased to con- 
tain gentlefolk, we shall still be able to find them 
in the zoological gardens. 

During my interview with the sheep, freight 
trains had passed once or twice without disturb- 
ing him or attracting his notice ; but as I walked 
away and left him grazing, there came by a 
switching-engine that made a great noise. This 
didn't frighten him, but set him in a rage. Once 
again he leaped into the air waving his fore legs 
and eccentrically descended to charge with fury 
his telegraph pole. Yes, he was " tyme," if by 
that word one is to understand that he was shy 



184 The Mountain Sheep 

neither of men nor locomotives ; but just here 
there is a hole in our dictionary. Do you 
imagine that five years of captivity are going to 
tame the blood and the nerves of a creature that 
came over the Aleutian bridge from Asia during 
the Pleistocene, and has been running wild in the 
mountains until 1887 ? He was " tame " enough 
to pay you no attention — until he wanted to kill 
you ; and this was what he did want when I saw 
him on the first day of the following December. 
Then was his rutting time ; he was ready to 
attack and destroy with his powerful horns any- 
thing in Livingston ; and so it was in a stable 
that I found the poor fellow, took a peep through 
the quarter-opened door, where his owner had 
shut him and tied him in the dark, away from 
his natural rights of love and war. I noted his 
winter coat of maltese, I heard his ominous 
breathing, I saw the wild dangerous lustre in 
his rolling eye ; and that was my farewell to 
the captive. 

So good a chance to study a live ram I have 
never had again. Upon the other occasions when 
I have been able to approach them at all, study 
has not been my object, and the distance between 
us has been greater ; but on one happy later day, 



The Mountain Sheep 185 

I watched a ewe with her lamb for the good part 
of a morning. 

In the summer of 1885, as I have said, the 
mountain sheep had not yet forsaken quite acces- 
sible regions in Wyoming ; and very likely he still 
came down low in most of his old haunts. The 
small band which I saw was not many miles from 
one of the largest ranches in that country, and 
the creatures stood in full sight of a travelled 
road, — not at that time a stage-road, but one that 
might be daily frequented by people riding or 
people driving on their way north from Medi- 
cine Bow into the immense cattle country of the 
Platte and of the Powder River still farther 
beyond, all the way to the Bighorn Mountains. 
Those very mountains that bear the sheep's 
name and were once so full of sheep as well as 
of every other Rocky Mountain big game are 
now sacked and empty. Hidden here and there, 
some may exist yet, but as fugitives in a sanctu- 
ary, not as free denizens of the wild. I sa w three 
year s bring this change which thirty years had 
not brought ; and in 1 888 you would have 
looked in vain, I think, for sheep on the road 
from Medicine Bow to Fetterman. I found 
them that year at no such stone's throw from 



1 86 The Mountain Sheep 

the easy levels of the earth, but up in the air a 
great distance. 

The Washakie Needle, for steepness, is truly a 
heartrending country, and that is why the sheep 
are there. In it rise Owl Creek, Grey Bull, and 
certain other waters tributary to the Bighorn ; 
^ and I have never gone with pack-horses in a 
worse place. A worse place, in fact, I have never 
seen ; though they tell me that where Green 
River heads on the Continental Divide (in plain 
sight from the Washakie Needle across the inter- 
vening Wind River country) you can, if you so 
desire, enmesh yourself, lose yourself among 
cleavages and caiions that slice and slit the 
mountains to a shredded labyrinth. From the 
edge of that rocky web I stepped back, discour- 
aged, a year later; and for vertical effects the 
Washakie Needle remains, as they say, "good 
enough " for me. We struggled to it through 
a land of jumping-off places, a high, bald, bris- 
tling clot of mountains that, just beyond the 
southeast corner of the Yellowstone Park, come 
from several directions to meet and tie themselves 
into this rich tangle of peaks, ledges, and descents. 
You really never did see such a place ! and my 
memory of it is made lurid by an adventure with 




UNDER A HOT SKY — {Oms nelsoni) 



The Mountain Sheep 189 

a thunder-storm which cannot be chronicled here 
because it happened on one of the days when we 
found elk, but most lamentably missed our sheep. 
Missing a sheep, let me say, is of all missing the 
most thorough that I know. 

Encouragement, false encouragement, had come 
to us after our very first night in camp by the 
Washakie Needle. The next night we had wild 
mutton for supper. That initial day, Wednesday, 
August twenty-ninth, brought us this sweet luck, 
sweet not alone in its promise of more (for the 
country was evidently full of sheep), but almost 
equally because of late, during our perilous jour- 
ney, we had come down to bacon. Now, to be a 
hunting party, to be in the Shoshone Mountains 
in August, 1888, and to be eating bacon, was to be 
humiliated ; only our hard travelling that allowed 
no attending to other business could excuse such 
a bill of fare ; hence did our pride and our stom- 
achs hail this wild mutton. There was not much 
of him to hail : he was a young ram ; and be- 
tween six of us, after bacon . . . need I say 
more? 

It had been my intention, until this very para- 
graph, to skip what happened next day. But I 
am growing confidential ; these shall be the con- 



190 The Moimtain Sheep 

fessions of a bad shot. I have read in books and 
in periodicals so many pages where none but 
good shots were ever fired ; I have Hstened — 
merciful heaven ! — to the tales of my sportsman 
friends ; and, reader, unless you are not at all like 
me, you have read such pages too, have listened 
to such stories too, and you have found a monot- 
ony creep over these triumphs of other people, 
— the hair's-breadth climb, the noiseless approach, 
the long-range shot, one hundred yards, two hun- 
dred, five hundred, with sights not adjusted but 
elevation merely guessed at, and the inevitably 
unerring resuljt; and in the midst of all this 
asphyxiating skill, you have sometimes longed for 
one pure, fresh breath of failure — have you not ? 
Well, at all events you shall read of mine ; and, 
besides variety, there is a second good reason for 
this ; you could not better learn the ways of the 
mountain sheep, which, so far as I know them, I 
am attempting to tell you. 

Four of us were so foolish as to set out together 
upon this evil morning; two parties, that is, of 
the guide and the guided. There is never any 
gain in doing this, and almost always loss. The 
attention which you should be giving to your 
business is divided by conversation, or by waiting 



The Mountain Sheep 191 

for some member of the party who has fallen be- 
hind ; and no matter how silent you keep your- 
selves, four people are sure at some wrong 
moment to prove conspicuous ; bette r hun t alone, 1 \ 
unless circumstances make it wise that there 
should be two of you — steep country does make 
this wise — but assuredly never go after game in 
fours, as we two white men and two Indians went 
now. We labored and we labored and we finally 
were upon the top instead of at the bottom of 
something. It was no more than a ridge, not 
high, that everywhere dropped off into our own 
valley or the next one ; but two sweating hours 
had gone in getting merely here, and here our 
eight eyes discerned sheep, quite aband of them. 
Not, however, before the sheep had discerned us 
four wily hunters. We did not know this then, 
because they stayed still where they seemed to be 
grazing. It was a great way off in a straight line 
through the air, for the sheep were small dots 
upon the mountain ; and there was no straight 
line for us to reach them by. We labored and we 
labored down to a new bottom and upward on a 
new slope, and made a most elaborate "sneak," 
crouching, and stopping, and generally manoeu- 
vring among stones, gravel, and harsh tufts of 



192 The Mountain Sheep 

growth ; so did we come with splendid caution 
upon where the sheep had been, and, lifting our 
heads, beheld the vacuum that they had left, and 
themselves contemplating us from the extreme 
top of the mountain. I am sure that you know 
how it feels to have your foot step into space at 
what you thought was the bottom of the staircase. 
There is a gasp of very particular sensation con- 
nected with this, and that is what I had now, 
followed at once by the no less distasteful retro- 
spect of myself with my half-cocked rifle, crawl- 
ing carefully for yards upon my belly, while the 
sheep watched me doing it. There they were on 
the top of this new mountain, a way far abovejos^ 
and we four hunters proceeded to go on wrong, 
as we had begun. I have forgotten to mention 
that, among our other follies, we had brought 
horses. Never do such a thing ! If you are not 
injrammg good enough to hunt mountain sheep 
on your own legs, wait and climb about for a few 
days until you have got your breath. What my 
horse did for me on this precious day was this : 
our hills were too steep for him to carry me up, 
so I led him ; they were too steep for him to carry 
me down, so I led him ; and betweenwhiles, when 
I was stalking sheep, I naturally had to leave him 



The Mountain Sheep 193 

behind, and naturally had to go back for him 
when the stalk was over. You will have by this 
time but a middling opinion of my common 
sense ; but please bear in mind that Shoshone 
Indians invariably hjant with horses, and that in 
those days I was still too much one of the " guided " 
to be equal to dictating to any Indian what trail 
we should go, and in what manner we should hunt. 
This entire hunt of 1888, from the distant Tetons 
and the waters of Snake River over to the Wa- 
shakie Needle and Owl Creek, is a tale of struggle 
between ourselves and our red-skinned guides ; 
we were beginning to know the mountains, to 
crave exploration, to try the unbeaten path ; and 
for an Indian (though you would never suspect it 
until you suffered from it) the 2^;^beaten path is 
the one that he never wishes to try and will do 
all things to escape — even to deserting you and 
going home. 

We hunters now set our legs to new laboring, 
and presently were again weltering in sweat , and 
could look down into a third valley similar to the 
two we had so painfully quitted. Down at the 
bottom of this new gash in the hills went a little 
stream like all the others, and beyond bristled 
interminably the knife-like intersections of the 



194 The Mountain Sheep 

mountains. We had placed our sheep behind a 
Httle rise along the summit, and between this and 
ourselves some three hundred yards still inter- 
vened. We were, of course, much above where 
any trees grew, and the ground was of that stony 
sort with short growth and no great rocks immedi- 
ately near ; a high, lumpy pasture of mounds and 
hollows, wet with snows but lately melted, hailed 
upon often, rained on but seldom. Lower down, 
this pasture country (which made the top of all 
but the highest and severest mountains) fell away 
in descents of gravel and sheer plunges of rock. 
To get closer to our sheep we now discovered we 
must go down some of this hill we had just come 
up ; they were on the watch, but were fortunately 
watching the wrong place, and we all sat down 
in happy pride for a consultation. The other 
side of the hill had turned out suddenly to be a 
precipice, a regular jumping-o£f one, that went 
a long way and ended in a crumble of shifting 
stones, and then took a jump or two more and so 
reached the water at the distant bottom. This 
side was our only possible course, and we took 
another look at the sheep. They had given up 
watching, and in joy we started for them quickly. 
We had so skilfully chosen the ground for our 



The Mountain Sheep 195 

approach that we were screened by a succession 
of little rises and hollows which lay between us 
and the sheep. This time, this time, there 
was to be no crawling up to find a vacuum, no 
raising your head to discover the departed sheep 
taking a bird's-eye view of you ! What the 
hearts of the other hunters did, I don't know, 
but my heart thumped with vindictive elation 
as we sped crouching among the little inter- 
vening hollows, perfectly hidden from the sheep 
and drawing close to them at last. Only one 
more rise and hollow lay between us and where 
they were pasturing; and over that rise we 
hastened straight into the laps of some twenty^ 
sheep we had known nothing about; they were 
all lying down. Neither had they known any- 
thing about us ; the surprise was mutual. All 
round me I saw them rise, as it were, like one 
man and take to diving over the precipice. Be- 
wilderment closed over me like a flood ; all my 
senses melted into one blurred pie of perception 
in which I was aware only of hind legs and hop- 
ping. Frightful language was pouring from me, 
but I didn't hear what it was ; all was a swirl and 
scatter of men and sheep. Not one of us hunters 
was ready with his gun or his intelligence. We 



196 The Mountain Sheep 

indiscriminately stampeded to the edge, and there 
went the sheep, husthng down over the stones, 
sliding, springing, and dissolving away. And 
now, suddenly, when it was of no use at all, we 
remembered that we carried rifles, and like a 
chorus in a comic opera we stood on the brow of 
the mountain, concertedly working the levers, 
firing our Winchesters into space. 

It's all fifteen years ago ; yet as I read over my 
relentless cam^djary, I blush in spite of laughter ; 
it's hot work staring truth in the face ! And now 
comes the last feeble pop of the ridiculous. We 
turned our heads, and beheld the sheep we had 
come for, the sheep we had climbed two moun- 
tains for, the sheep we had at length got within 
a hundred yards of, just disappearing over a final 
ridge so far away that there remained to them no 
color, and only one dimension — len gt h. They 
looked like a handful of toothpicks. They natu- 
rally had not been idle while we were so busy; 
while we were losing our heads, they had kept 
theirs ; and during that brief fusillade of ours — 
the whole preposterous affair could not have filled 
more than three minutes — they had put such a 
stretch of ups and downs between us, that going 
after them any more was not to be thought of. 



The Mountain Sheep 197 

We stood at the empty top of the mountain 
with our ruined day. There was not a Hve ani- 
mal in sight anywhere. Those that jumped into 
the valley were lost among the pines, and warned 
about us beyond retrieve. We had banged away 
at such a rate up here that a wide circle of sheep 
must be apprised of our neighborhood. Why had 
we done it .? For just the same reason that a num- 
ber of brave persons ran away suddenly at Bull 
Run as if perdition were at their heels. Surprise, 
I take it, is at the bottom of the most unaccount- 
able acts of men. And if you wonder why our 
two Indians were surprised, I can only answer 
with a theory of mine that Indians who hunt on 
horseback have small knowledge of mountain 
sheep. Antelope, deer, white-tail and black, and 
even elk, can be, and are constantly thus hunted 
by the Indians ; but when it comes to climbing 
where the horses cannot go, I suspect that his 
rider seldom goes either. Looking back, I see 
now that this whole excursion was conducted 
ignorantly, and that our guides (both of them 
excellent hunters of other game) neglected the 
very first principle here, namely, to get to the 
top of the mountains and hunt down. 

We returned our long way to camp, and the 



198 The Motmtain Sheep 

elk that one of us shot at sundown made no 
atonement for our melancholy farce. My diary 
concludes, " So ended Thursday, August 30, a 
most instructive day, full of weather, wind, and 
experience." 

By breakfast we were bearing up a little, mak- 
ing much of the fact that, after all, the sheep we 
had seen were only ewes and lambs. This would 
not have caused us to spare them, to be sure ; we 
were out of fresh meat when we saw them ; and 
though the head and horns of a ewe do not make 
a noble trophy for the sportsman, they represent 
hard work, and are decidedly better than nothing 
at all when you are a beginner, and hungry. 

We took another course, making for moun- 
tains on the side of the valley opposite from 
yesterday's route. My Indian was not hopeful. 
" Too much shoot," he remarked. " Run away." 
But presently we passed very fresh tracks, and 
began one of those ascents where you are continu- 
ally sure that the next top is the real top. We 
had come looking for the sheep at a season when 
he is living mostly upon the roof of his house. 
He, with the goat, inhabits, it may be fairly 
said, the tallest mansion of all our ruminants; 
indeed, you may put the whole case thus : — 



The Mountain Sheep 199 

Our Rocky Mountains are a four-story build- 
ing. The bottom is the sage-brush and cotton- 
wood, the second is pines and quaking-asp, the 
third is willow bushes, wet meadows, and mo- 
raines, and the fourth is bald rocks and snow- 
fields. The house begins about five thousand 
feet high, and runs to fourteen thousand. We 
have nothing to do with the prairie-dog and 
others that live in the cellar; it is the antelope 
to which the first floor belongs, and also the 
white-tail deer, which, however, gets up a little into 
the second. The elk, the black-tail, and the mule- 
deer possess second and third stories in common, 
while the fourth is the exclusive territory of the 
sheep and the goat. But here is the difference ; 
these latter (the sheep, certainly) descend to all 
the other stories if the season drives or the humor 
suits them ; they go from roof to ground, while 
the other animals seldom, save when hunted, are 
to be met above or below their assigned levels. 
I have met a sheep on Wind River in July where 
the sage-brush was growing, and another on a 
wooded foot-hill just above Jackson's Lake. 

This day we went to the fourth story by a 
staircase dear to the heart of a sheep. I mounted 
through an uncanny domain where all about me 



200 The Mountain Sheep 

stood little pillars of round stones baked together 
in mud, and planted on end, each supporting a 
single rock of another color set upon them trans- 
versely; shafts of necromancy they would have 
seemed in the age of witches, altars which might 
flame by night while some kind of small, naked 
beings with teeth held rites over the traveller's 
crushed body, for from one's feet here the little 
stones rolled down to right and left into depths 
invisible. You who have not seen cannot imag- 
ine how here and there in the Rocky Mountains 
these masonries of nature suggest the work not 
of men but demons. Silence drew around me as 
I passed upward through the weird dwarf Stone- 
henge; and on top we found ourselves looking 
down the other side at a gray stump which pres- 
ently moved. The glasses showed us the stump's 
legs and fine curling horns ; and our hearts, 
which had been for some time heavy at the poor 
luck, grew light. Only, how to get at him } 

We had almost given up the game when we 
spied the ram ; we had come so far for so long ; 
and we now had been sitting upon — almost 
straddling — this ultimate ridge, with the Indian 
every little while lugubriously repeating, " No 
sheep." The ram had not a suspicion of us, and 




SURPRISED (White Sheep— 0w5 dalli) 



The Mountain Sheep 203 

presently lay down in the sun near the bottom 
of a rocky gulch. The whole of the gulch 
we could not see, not even when we had crawled 
down a side of the mountain, an endless surface 
of rolling stones with scanty patches of grass 
and an occasional steadfast rock. This descent 
seemed the most taxing effort yet. It was nearly 
always (and sometimes quite) impossible to stir a 
foot or a hand, or shift any fraction of my weight, 
without starting a rippling stream of stones that 
chuckled and bounced and gathered noise as 
they flowed downward, and finally sprang into a 
rocky chasm which gave out hollow roars. I 
often felt certain these sounds must reach the 
ram ; but they were only next door to him, so to 
speak, and separated by the tilted wall of moun- 
tain which divided his gulch from the one down 
the side of which I was so very gradually making 
my way. I don't believe the whole distance could 
have been more than three hundred yards ; yet I 
was nearly thirty minutes accomplishing it with 
the help of the grass tufts and every other fixture 
that came within available reach in this sliding 
sea of stones. I at length arrived where I wanted 
to be, and a truly unkind thing happened : I was 
taken with " buck-fever " ! It didn't prevent my 



204 The Motmtain Sheep 

finally getting a shot in ; but here is the whole 
adventure. 

I lifted myself and looked over the edge into 
the next gulch. There was the ram, who saw me 
at the same moment, and rose. I probably missed 
him ; for after my shot he continued to walk 
toward me in a leisurely manner, not fifty yards 
distant, I should think, down in his gulch. 
Whether I fired at him again or not, I cant re- 
member, — couldn't remember that same evening 
when I tried to put the whole event faithfully 
down in my diary! Buck-fever is not the only 
reason for this uncertainty ; for now, from behind 
every rock below me, horns rose up like tricks 
out of a trap-door, apparitions of horns every- 
where, an invasion of mountain sheep. They 
came straight up to me, — this was the most up- 
setting part of it all. Not one did I see running 
down the gulch ; they hadn't made me out, or 
made anything out, save that some noise had 
disturbed them. They came up and up around 
me, passing me, steadily coming and going on 
over the mountain while my buck-fever raged. 
" I saw their big grave eyes and the different 
shades of their hair, and noticed their hoofs 
moving — but whether they came by fast or slow, 



The Mountain Sheep 205 

or what number there were, I cannot remember 
at all." Such are the actual words I wrote not 
more than six hours later, and I am glad to 
possess this searching record of that day and of 
my bygone state of mind ; for with the best 
honesty in the world no man can from memory 
alone rebuild the minute edifice of truth that has 
been covered by the heap of fifteen gathering 
years. So I stood, crazy and inefficient, upon the 
mountains, and after a little no more sheep were 
there. A speck of conscious action remained 
with me, namely, that during the passage of the 
sheep I had held myself enough in control to get 
" a bead " on the broadside of two successively ; 
I remembered following them along for a moment 
with my rifle before pulling the trigger. But 
these I never saw again, and know not where I 
hit them — if hit them I did. One trophy re- 
mains to show for this day. A ram that had 
been shot at some moment of the invasion re- 
turned to the gulch where I was, and stood at a 
short distance above me ; and then I succeeded 
in placing one shot where I meant it to go. 

The visions of this band, as it scattered in twos 
and threes after crossing my gulch, would incline 
me to guess there must have been from fifteen to 



2o6 The Mountain Sheep 

twenty of them — all rams. Their sex is quite 
certain ; the most intense impression that was 
given to my unstrung perceptions is of their 
huge curving horns and their solemn eyes. It is 
hateful to think that some of them were hurt and 
so went off to limp, or to die ; and I am thankful 
to have but very few memories of wanton shoot- 
ing, and some consoling ones of temptations 
resisted. These rams mostly escaped the indis- 
criminate blasts from my rifle ; of this I am sure. 
I saw them, high and low, near and far, scuttling 
into safety over the steep ridges, or down into 
unseen cafions; and upon presently searching 
the vicinity, we found but one trace of blood. As 
for the buck-fever, it was the first seizure that I 
ever had, and it has proved the last. Why it 
should have held off in previous years and come 
down upon me in 1888, who shall say? You 
will wonder as much as I do that a silver-tip 
bear did not give me the slightest touch of it 
in July, 1887. A bear is more important game 
than a sheep ; this grizzly was the first I had 
ever seen, and I was less experienced. Excita- 
bility is a matter of temperament that varies in- 
finitely; but this scarcely explains why, with a 
bear to shoot, no cucumber could have been 



The Mountain Sheep 207 

cooler than I was one year, and why the next, 
with these rams, I seem to have been a useless 
imbecile. The unexpected apparition of so many 
animals does not account for it, because when I 
raised myself to look over the ridge before my 
first shot that brought them into sight, I was 
shaking thoroughly. 

These proceedings did not, at any rate, impair 
appetite. With the flavor of elk, deer, antelope, 
bear, and even porcupine, we were familiar; but 
wild mutton was still a great novelty, and we 
found it the most palatable of all. I say " we 
found it " and not " it was," because I have found 
a lump of dough sponged round a tin plate full 
of bacon grease so very delicious ! The romance 
of wild game so mixes with its taste that we 
carve a venison steak with unction and respect. 
Yet I have come almost to think that our good 
old friend roast beef is more savory than any- 
thing we can find in the woods. If it is merely 
the pleasure of the table that you seek, take a 
good walk every day in the park, or even just 
up and down town, and the meats from your 
kitchen (if your lot is blest with a kitchen) will 
be superior to all the meats of camp. 

I become, as I look back, surer than ever that 



2o8 The Mountain Sheep 

our Indians knew not much more than we did 
ourselves about the habits of the mountain sheep, 
and that they did as Httle reasoning as we did. 
On the day preceding this, what had been our 
experience ? To run into bands of ewes and 
lambs. If the women and children were thus 
off by themselves in the month of August, it was 
no great jump to conclude that the men must 
be keeping each other company somewhere else. 
When we spied that ram down the gulch sun- 
ning himself, we should have tried to ascertain 
whether or not he was alone. As a matter of 
natural history, the summer season does find 
the Ovis canadensis, as well as many other of 
the ruminants, thus separated by sex; and the 
chances are that if you meet a ewe she is not far 
from more, and that a ram had better not be pre- 
sumed solitary until his individual habit has been 
so proved. You are not likely to find ewes and 
rams together till the rutting season,^ in Decem- 
ber. I have read in some book, or books, that 
the lambs are dropped in March, but I think this 
is a somewhat early date, or, rather, that many 

^ The ram's horns cease growing at the time of the rutting sea- 
son, and do not begin again until the spring brings nourishing food. 
This causes the rings on the horns, it is said, which indicate the 
number of winters old the sheep is. 



The Mountain Sheep 209 

come in April, and that it is scarcely correct to 
limit their season to the single month. The 
lambs, from the time of their birth on into the 
late fall, follow their careful mothers — receive, in 
fact, a half-year's bringing up. And I had, one 
day in September, 1896, the singular good fortune 
to watch a mamma with her child for a period 
even longer than my observation of the ram at 
Livingston. 

The Tetons lie just south of the Yellowstone 
Park, and directly upon the borders of Wyoming 
and Idaho. Any recent map might seem to prove 
this geography inaccurate, because, as I under- 
stand it, a late extension of the timber reservation 
reaches below these mountains, and most wisely 
includes both them and Jackson's Lake with the 
whole piece of country eastward to the Conti- 
nental Divide. Of all places in the Rocky Moun- 
tains that I know, it is the most beautiful ; and, 
as it lies too Jiigh for man to build and prosper 
in, its trees and w aters should be kept from man's 
irresponsible destruction ; those forests feed the 
great river system of the Columbia and Snake. 
But I have been a poacher, according to the 
recent map. In 1896, however, the line was 
north of me by a few miles ; and the day before 



2IO The Mountain Sheep 

I saw the ewe and the lamb, I had shot a ewe. 
It is, I beheve, considered unsportsmanlike to do 
this ; I have never seen the sportsman yet, though, 
who would not cheerfully bring home a ewe to an 
empty larder. Our larder was empty, even of fish, 
which had been plentiful until we had climbed up 
here among the Tetons, where the brooks ran too 
small for fish. 

My object this second day was to find, if I 
could, a ram ; and it proved one of those occa- 
sions (sadly rare in my experience) when, being 
disappointed of one's wish, something actually 
Better descends from the gods, bringing consola- 
tion. It was a climb less severe than those of 
which I have already written, for our camp among 
the Tetons was close to the fourth story; less, I 
should suppose, than a thousand feet above our 
tent, the mountain grew bare of trees. Upward 
from this, it was not a long walk to snow. 

When first I saw the mother and child, I 
already had them at a great disadvantage ; they 
were, to be sure, where I had not expected them 
to be, but I was where they had not expected me 
to be ; and thus I became aware of them a long 
distance below me, actually coming up to me by 
the trail I had come myself. Trail, you must 



The Mountain Sheep in 

understand, does not here mean a path beaten by 
men, or even by game, but simply the pleasant- 
est way of getting up this part of the mountain. 
The mother had been taking her child upon a 
visit to the third story, had been away down 
among the pine woods and open places, where 
brooks ran and grass grew with several sorts of 
flowers and ripe berries ; and now she was return- 
ing to the heights of her own especial world. 
Alas for my camera ! it was irretrievably in 
camp. I laid my useless rifle down, for from 
me neither of these lives should receive any 
hurt ; and with the next best thing to a camera 
— my field-glasses — I got ready for a survey of 
this family as prolonged and thorough as they 
should allow. But field-glasses are a poor second 
best in such a case ; a few pictures of this lady 
and her offspring "at home" would have told 
you more than my words have any hope of 
conveying. 

I never saw people in less haste. From begin- 
ning to end they treated the whole mountain as 
you would treat your library (dining room were, 
perhaps, nearer the mark) upon an idle morning 
between regular meals. No well-to-do matron, 
with her day's housekeeping finished, could have 



212 The Mountain Sheep 

looked out of the window more serenely than 
this ewe surveyed her neighborhood. The two 
had now arrived at what, in their opinion, was a 
suitable place for stopping. "Their" opinion is not 
correct ; it was, I soon unmistakably made out, 
the mamma who — far more than the average 
American mother as American mothers go now 
— decided what was good and proper for her 
child. This lamb was being brought up as strictly 
as if it were English. They had just completed a 
somewhat long and unrelieved ascent, — so I had, 
at any rate, previously found it. This upper 
region of the mountain rose above the tree belt 
in three well-marked terraces which were rimmed 
by walls of rock extremely symmetrical. Each 
terrace made a platform fairly level and fairly 
wide, upon which one was glad to linger for a 
while before ascending the slant to the next 
terrace wall. I was seated at the edge of the top 
terrace, a floor of stones and grass and very thick 
little spruce and juniper bushes ; the mamma had 
just attained the terrace next below me, and up 
the wall after her had climbed and scrambled 
the little lamb with (I was diverted to notice) 
almost as much difficulty as I had found at that 
spot myself. The mamma knew a good deal 




THE SADDLEBACK SHEEP — [Or^s fanmnO 



The Mountain Sheep 215 

more about climbing than the lamb and I 
did. 

There this couple stood in full view some 
few hundred feet — about three hundred, I 
should think — below me ; and here sat I at my 
ease, like a person looking over a comfortable 
balcony, observing them through my glass. 
There was a certain mirth in the thought how 
different would have been the mamma's deport- 
ment had she become aware that herself, her 
child, and her privacy were all in the presence of 
a party who was taking notes. But she, through- 
out, never became aware of this, and I sat the 
witness of a domestic hour full of discipline, 
encouragement, and instruction. The glasses 
brought them to a nearness not unlike peeping 
through the keyhole ; I could see the color of 
their eyes. The lady's expression could easily 
have passed for critical. After throwing a glance 
round the terrace, her action to the lamb was 
fairly similar to remarking, " Yes, there are no 
improper persons here; you may play about if 
you wish." 

Some such thing happened between them, 
for, after waiting for the scrambling lamb to come 
up with her on the level and stand beside her, 



2i6 The Mountain Sheep 

she appeared to dismiss it from her thoughts. 
She moved over the terrace, grazing a little, 
walking a little, stopping, enjoying the fine day, 
while her good child amused itself by itself. 
I feared but one thing, — that the wind might take 
to blowing capriciously, and give their noses 
warning that a heathen stranger was in the 
neighborhood. But the happy wind flowed 
gentle and changeless along the heights of the 
mountains. I have not more enjoyed anything 
in the open air than that sitting on the terrace 
watching those creatures whose innocent blood 
my hands were not going to shed. 

After a proper period of relaxation, the mother 
judged it time to go on. There was nothing 
haphazard in her action ; of that I am con- 
vinced. How she did it, how she intimated to 
the lamb that they couldn't stop here any longer, 
I don't pretend to know. I do, however, know 
that it was no mere wandering upward herself, 
confident the lamb would follow; because pres- 
ently (as I shall describe) she quite definitely 
made the lamb stay behind. She now began 
mounting the hill right toward me, not fast but 
steadily, waiting now and then, precisely as other 
parents wait, for her toddling child to come up 



The Mountain Sheep 217 

with her. Here and there were bushes of some 
close stiff leaf, that she walked through easily, 
but which were too many for the toddling child. 
The lamb would sometimes get into the middle 
of one of these and find itself unable to push 
through ; after one or two little efforts, it would 
back out and go round some other way, and 
then I would see it making haste to where its 
mother stood waiting. Upon one of these 
occasions the mother received it with a manner 
that seemed almost to say : " Good gracious, 
at your age I found no trouble with a thing of 
that kind ! " They drew, by degrees, so near me 
that I put away my glasses. There was a time 
when they were not fifty feet below me and I 
could hear their little steps ; and once the ewe 
sneezed in the most natural manner. While I 
was wondering what on earth they would do 
when they found themselves stepping upon the 
terrace into my lap, the ewe saw a way she liked 
better. Had she gone to my left as I watched 
her, and so reached my level, the wind would 
have infallibly betrayed me ; but she turned the 
other way and went along beneath the terrace 
wall to a patch of the bushes high enough to 
make severe work for the lamb. While she was 



21 8 The Mountain Sheep 

doing this, I hastened to a new position. Where 
I had been sitting she was bound to see me as 
soon as she cHmbed twenty feet higher, and I 
accordingly sought a propitious cover, and found 
it in a clump of evergreens. She got to the wall 
where she could make one leap of it. It was 
done in a flash, and resembled nothing that any 
well-to-do matron could perform ; but once at the 
top, she was again the complete matron. She 
scanned the new ground critically and with ap- 
parent satisfaction at first. I stole the glasses to 
my eyes and saw her closed lips wearing quite 
the bland expression of a lady's that I know 
when she has entered a room to make a call, and 
finds the wall-paper and furniture reflect, on the 
whole, favorably upon the lady of the house. 
Meanwhile, the poor little lamb was vainly 
springing at the wall ; the jump was too high 
for it. Its front hoofs just grazed the edge, and 
back it would tumble to try again. Finally it 
bleated ; but the mother deemed this not a mo- 
ment for indulgence. She gave not the slight- 
est attention to the cry for assistance. There 
was nothing dangerous about the place, no un- 
reasonable hardship in getting the best of the 
wall ; and by her own processes, whether you 



The Mountain Sheep 219 

term them thought or instinct, she left her child 
to meet one of the natural difficulties of life, and 
so gain self-reliance. 

Do you think this fanciful ? That is because 
you have not sufficiently thought about such 
things. The mamma did undoubtedly not use 
the words " self-reliance " or " natural difficulties 
of life " ; but if she had not her sheep equivalent 
for what these words import, her species would 
a long while ago have perished off the earth. The 
mountain sheep is a master at the art of self- 
preservation ; its eye is tenfold keener than 
man's, because it has to be, and so is its foot ten 
or twenty fold more agile ; every sense is devel- 
oped to an extreme alertness. It measures foot- 
hold more justly than we do, because it has had 
to flee from dangers that do not beset us. That 
the maternal instinct (which these mothers retain 
until their young can shift for themselves) should 
fail in a matter so immediate as the needs of its 
young to understand rock climbing, is a notion 
more unreasonable than that it should be con- 
stantly attentive to this point. But — better than 
any talk of mine — the next step taken by the 
ewe will show how much she was climbing this 
mountain with an eye to her offspring. 



220 The Motmtain Sheep 

The lamb had bleated and brought no sign 
from her. She continued standing, or moving 
a few feet onward in my direction. This means 
that she was coming up a quite gentle slant, and 
that thirty yards more would land her at my ever- 
green bush. She came nearer than thirty yards 
and abruptly stopped. She had suddenly not 
liked the looks of my evergreen. Behind her 
on one side, the last steep ascent of the moun- 
tain rose barer and barer of all growth to its 
stony, invisible summit which a curve of the 
final ridge hid from view. Behind her, down 
the quiet slant of the terrace, was the wall where 
she had left the lamb. She now backed a few 
stiff steps, keeping her eye upon the evergreen. 
Her uncertainty about it, and the ladylike re- 
serve of her shut lips, caused me to choke with 
laughter. To catch a wild animal going through 
a (what we call) entirely human proceeding has 
always been to me a delightful experience ; and 
from now to the end this sheep's course was as 
human as possible. I had been so engaged with 
watching her during the last few minutes that 
I had forgotten the lamb. The lamb had some- 
how got up the wall and was approaching. Its 
mamma now turned and moderately hastened 



The Mountain Sheep 221 

down the slope to it. What was said between 
them I don't know; but the child came no far- 
ther in my suspicious direction ; it stayed be- 
hind among some little bushes, and the mother 
returned to scrutinize my hiding-place. She 
looked straight at me, straight into my eyes it 
seemed, and her curiosity and indecision again 
choked me with laughter. She came even 
nearer than she had come before. How much 
of me she saw I cannot tell, but probably my 
hair and forehead; she at any rate concluded 
that this was no suitable place. She turned as 
I have seen ladies turn from a smoking-car, and 
with no haste sought her child again. How she 
managed their next move passes my comprehen- 
sion ; I imagined that every foot of the moun- 
tain ascent near me was in my full view. But 
it was not. Quite unexpectedly I now became 
aware of the two, trotting over the shoulder of 
the ridge above me, with already two or three 
times the distance between us that had been just 
now. If I had wished to follow them, it would 
have been useless, and' I had seen enough. 
When I was ready, I made for the summit my- 
self. The side which I had so far come up was 
the south side, and a little further climbing took 



222 The Mountain Sheep 

me over the narrow shoulder to the north, where 
I was soon walking in long patches of snow. 
Across these in front of me went the tracks of 
the mamma and her lamb, the sage and gentle 
guide with the little novice who was learning 
the mountains and their dangers ; across these 
patches I followed them for several miles, because 
my way happened to be theirs. No doubt they 
saw me sometimes ; but I never saw them again. 
I hope no harm ever came to them ; for I like 
to think of these two, these members of an inno- 
cent and charming race that we are making away 
with, as remaining unvexed by our noise and 
destruction, remaining serene in the freedom that 
lives among their pinnacles of solitude. 



The Mountain Sheep 223 

AMERICAN BIGHORN 

(OVIS CANADENSIS^) 

The bighorn of the American continent, inclu- 
sive of its local races (frequently regarded as dis- 
tinct species), is a large sh eep, distinguished from 
the Asiatic argalis, among other features, by the 
comparative smoothness of the horns, in which 
the outer front angle is prominent, and the inner 
one rounded off, and also by the smaller size of 
the face glands. There is a well-marked whitish 
patch on the rump, but the amount of white on 
the under parts and legs shows considerable local 
variation. In the typical Rocky Mountain race 
[O. canadensis typicd) the ears are long and 
pointed, with short hair, and the horns, which are 
very heavy, diverge but little outwards, and gen- 
erally have the tips broken. The Californian 
O. canadensis nelsoni is a paler southern race. 
On the other hand, in O. canadensis stonei of the 
northwest territories the color of the back is very 
dark, and the white on the belly and legs sharply 
defined. And both in this race and the light- 
colored O. canadensis dalli of Alaska the horns 

1 " Records of Big Game," Rowland Ward, third edition. 



224 The Mountain Sheep 

are lighter, more divergent, and sharper pointed, 
while the ears tend to become shorter, blunter, 
and more hairy. Height at shoulder about 3 feet 
2 inches ; weight about 350 pounds. 

The horns of the ewes are very small in com- 
parison to those of the rams, seldom measuring 
more than 15 inches on the curve from base to 
tip. Large male horns are now difficult to obtain, 
and of late years it is seldom that those of fresh- 
killed specimens are seen exceeding 38 inches on 
the curve from tip to tip. American sportsmen 
are keen to obtain horns of large basal girth ; but 
these, as will be seen from the following table, 
rarely exceed 16 inches. The Maclaine of Loch- 
buie possesses a specimen whose girth, according 
to his own measurement, is 19 inches. 

Distribution. — North America, from the Rocky 
Mountains southward to Sonora, northern Mex- 
ico, and California, and northward to Alaska and 
the shores of Bering Sea. The Alaskan race, 
for at least some portion of the year, is snow- 
white. 



The Mountain Sheep 



225 



Measurements of Horns 



Circum- 
ference 



181 



[6i 



'7l 
'5 

i6i 
'5i 

f5 

'51 
i6i 

■51 
■5f 
t5i 
[6f 

t5i 
[6 

'7 
'5 
i6| 

'51 
[6i 

'5i 
16 

[6f 

'5i 

19 

'5i 

t4i 

16 

14 

'4l 

14I 

■5l 

I4f 

f4f 

'5i 

>3l 



25f 

(tips much 

worn) 



Tip to Tip 



24f 
19 



I9i 
19 



23f 
16 

ie 
15 

22| 



18^ 

16 

i7i 
i8i 

i7i 



Locality 



The Selkirks, 
B.C., 1885 
? 

Lower California 
Wyoming 

Wyoming 
Kootenay, B.C. 

Yellowstone 

? 
Rocky Moun- 
tains 
British Columbia 
Colorado 
Montana 

■? 



Bighorn 

Mountains 
Montana 
N.W. Territories 
Alberta, N.W.T. 
British Columbia 
British Columbia 
Mexico 

British Columbia 
British Columbia 
Wyoming 
Montana 
British Columbia 
Wyoming 
British Columbia 
Wyoming 
Wyoming 
? 

? 

? 
Montana 
Alberta, N.W.T. 
Wyoming 
Wyoming 
British Columbia 
British Columbia 



Owner 



W. F. Sheard 

W. Grant Mackay 
George H. Gould 
Picked up by 
T. W. H. Clarke 
T. W. H. Clarke 
Measured by John Fannin, 
Provincial Museum, B.C. 
British Museum 
Sir Edmund G. Loder, Bart. 
Otho Shaw 

J. W. R. Young 

St. George Littledale 

British Museum 

Sir Edmund G. Loder, Bart. 

W. A. Baillie-Grohman 

Gerald Buxton 

H. Seton-Karr 

Edmund Littledale 

S. Ratcliff 

Arnold Pike 

Captain F. Cookson 

Major C. C. Ellis 

J. A. H. Drought 

J. O. Shields 

J. Turner-Turner 

T. W. H. Clarke 

Major Maitland Kirwan 

R. H. Venables Kyrke 

Lord Rodney 

C. H. Kennard 

Moreton Frewen 

Gerald Buxton 

Thomas Bate 

J. D. Cobbold 

Gerald Buxton 

R. H. Sawyer 

Arnold Pike 

Capt. G. Dalrymple White 

Count E. Iloyos 

G. Wrey 

Hon. S. ToUemache 



226 



The Mountain Sheep 



Measurements of Horns {continued) 



Length 
ON Front 


Circum- 


Tip to Tip 


Locality 


Owner 


Curve 


ference 








35^ 


16 


21 


British Columbia 


T. P. Kempson 


35i 


i2i 


16 


California 


Sir Victor Brooke's Coll. 


35i 


i5i 


i8i 


British Columbia 


Sir Peter Walker, Bart. 


35 


14 


i8i 


British Columbia 


Admiral Sir Michael 
Culme-Seymour, Bart. 


-35 


15 


I9| 


Wyoming 


Count Schiebler 


35 


14 


16 


Wyoming 


Gerald Hardy 


34i 


I4f 


19 


S.E. Montana 


J. A. Jameson 


34i 


I4i 




California 


G. P. Fitzgerald 


-34 


16 


17 


N.W. Wyoming 


A. Rogers 


34 


i6i 


20 


British Columbia 
Border 


Barclay Bonthron 


zzl 


I5i 




British Columbia 


Admiral Sir Michael 
Culme-Seymour, Bart. 


ZZ 


15I 


18 


British Columbia 


Capt. E. G. Verschoyle 


33 


I4f 


24i 


Wyoming 


Lieut.-Col. Hon. W. Coke 


33 


I4i 


22 


? 


F. H. B. Ellis 


3i 


14 


23 


British Columbia 


T. P. Kempson 


3Z 


i5i 


22 


British Columbia 


A. E. Butter 


32i 


15I 


17I 


? 


C. G. R. Lee 


-32i 


HI 


19^ 


Fraser River, 
B.C. 


A. E. Leatham 


32i 


15 


17^ 


Lower California 


G. Barnardiston 


32 


15? 


i9i 


British Columbia 


J. W. Wood, Jr. 


32 


Hi 


i7i 


Yellowstone 
River 


British Museum 


3ii 


I4i 


I7i 


N.W. Territory 


Maj. Algernon Heber-Percy 


31 


17^ 




Grand Encamp- 
ment, Wyo. 


Frank Cooper 


-31 


13 


22 


British Columbia 


T. E. Buckley 


30I 


15 


23 
about 


? 


Hon. Walter Rothschild 


2P\ 


^5i 


17^ 


Lower California 


Ely Quilter 


Z0\ 


»5i 


18 


Wyoming 


J. L. Scarlett 


-30i 


14 


i5i 


Wyoming 


Hugh Peel 


30 


i5i 


14 


Alberta, N.W.T. 


F. C. Williamson 



ALASKAN BIGHORN {Ovis canadensis dallt) 



34 


I2f 


i8i 


Alaska 


Rowland Ward 


ZZ 


I2i 


15 


Alaska 


Hon. Walter Rothschild 


32I 


I3I 


20| 


Alaska 


J. T. Studley 
British Museum 


99i 


4| 


8 


Alaska 


British Museum 



THE WHITE GOAT AND HIS WAYS 

By Owen Wister 




ABOVE TIMBER LINE 



THE WHITE GOAT AND HIS 
WAYS 

Should you wish with your own eyes to look 
upon this odd and much-debated creature, it is 
(to name some of his territories) in the Saw 
Tooth Range in Idaho, and among the peaks 
northward from Lake Chelan, the Okanogan and 
Methow rivers, all three in Washington, and 
also upon many mountains near the coast in 
British Columbia that, if you climb high and 
hard enough, you are almost sure to find him ; 
and you would be perfectly certain to find him 
in the Zoological Gardens at Philadelphia to-day 
April twenty, 1903. But it may be that by the 
time you shall read this the summer heat of 
Philadelphia will have ended his existence there ; 
and this is the only place in our country (or in 
any country at present writing) where he is in 
captivity. Of his natural habitat and the inter- 
esting questions that it raises, I shall presently 
speak; let me at once dismiss the question 

831 



232 The White Goat 

of his species, now finally known as Oreamnus 
montanus. 

He is not a goat at all. We have fallen to 
speaking of him so in English because for a good 
number of years it has been the name he has 
gone by where he lives; but he is an antelope, 
and his nearest relative is the chamois, whose 
quite peculiar way of walking his own gait closely 
resembles. The chamois I have never hunted, 
but have often watched the singular hunching 
and truculent movement of the goat, as with head 
lowered (you might suppose for a charge) he 
slowly and heavily proceeds along his chosen 
vertiginous paths of rock and snow. He is a 
mountain antelope ; and his various Latin names, 
and the confusion, both popular and scientific, of 
which he was the subject through most of the 
nineteenth century, are curious and interesting 
matters. He was doubtless in zoologic truth an 
emigrant, having walked from frozen Asia to frozen 
America across that great old Aleutian Isthmus be- 
tween two frozen oceans, adjacent seas unmerged 
as yet by Behring Strait. With other newcomers 
he replaced the original dwellers of the soil, the 
American rhinoceros and any number more of old 
inhabitants with whom the climate had ceased to 



The White Goat 21^1^ 

agree. After landing upon our continent away 
up in the north the goat and sheep spread them- 
selves widely; but the goat not half nor a quarter 
so widely as the sheep. The more we compare 
these similar creatures, the more singular seem 
their contrasts. 

If they were fellow-travellers and twin arrivals, 
if they did come over the Aleutian bridge together, 
it is either because there was only one bridge and 
both had to use it, or else they fell out on the 
way, and reached here not on speaking terms. 
The first hypothesis is the one to which I incline : 
they had to use the same trail because there was 
only one. Sheep and goat do not seem to me to 
live on good terms, I should not venture this 
observation were it based upon my individual 
experience alone. What my campings have 
gradually led me to notice is this : you don't find 
sheep and goat on the same hill as you find elk 
and deer in the same wood. Considering that 
both animals like steep places, like rocks, like 
very high rocks ; and also that their respective 
habitats coincide in certain regions, — in British 
Columbia, for instance, and in Washington, and, 
I think one might fairly add, in Idaho, — I dare 
by no means make the sweeping assertion that 



234 T^^^ White Goat 

sheep and goat have never been found, or are never 
to be found, frequenting the same pasture ; I don't 
know this, and all of us do know that negatives 
are difficult of proof. But I have camped high 
in Washington, with goats in profusion all around, 
and the whole country looking precisely like a 
sheep country, yet never the sign of a sheep any- 
where to be seen. People said, " Plenty of sheep 
over there," and they would point to some clearly 
visible heights. And next, people came from not 
thirty miles away, having seen and killed sheep. 
It was the same latitude, the same altitude, the 
same season, the same everything. What is to be 
drawn from this ? That it was an accidental year, 
and just happened so for the few weeks that I was 
there .-^ This is the conclusion that you might 
draw, as I then did ; and you would be wrong, as 
I then was. For I returned there six years later, 
and it was still the case, and had been the case 
meanwhile, saving only that goats and sheep and 
all wild animals, wherever their chosen abode was, 
had been growing scarcer and shyer, and were 
approaching that extinction which we deal to all 
helpless things that do not minister to our own 
comfort and survival. During those intervening 
years I had hunted sheep in a country which for 



The Whiie Goat 235 

all the world looked as if a goat might come round 
the corner at any moment. But no goat ever 
did ; and yet, had I ridden down those mountains, 
and over a space of plains to the westward, and 
up the very first mountains I should then have 
met, there would then have been all the goat I 
wanted, and not (I have been told) a single 
sheep ! 

Thinking these things over, I began to wonder 
if some particular kind of food (since climate it 
could absolutely not be) was the cause of this 
flocking apart. Was there, perchance, some little 
herb which a goat must have and a sheep didn't 
like ? Well, if that be so, no botanist has so far 
told me its name ; while on the other hand, very 
recently, I have had news of a sportsman who was 
hunting in some mountains of British Columbia 
where sheep and goat were both readily to be 
found, and whose experience was like mine, only 
more marked and significant. He had stood upon 
one mountain where there were goat, and looked 
across to an adjacent one where he could plainly 
see sheep. Now on his mountain there was not 
a single sheep ; he must go to the other for them ; 
but over there he must expect no goat. He 
found this so, and he was assured that it was 



236 The White Goat 

always so : the animals did not seem to trespass 
upon each other's premises. 

These few facts that I have here gathered seem 
to me worthy of recording, and perhaps enough 
to warrant a presumption ; but insufficient for an 
assertion. Until others shall have on their part 
added similar observations, I would lay down no 
rule that a chronic hostility separates Ovis and 
Oreamnus. Perhaps such a rule has been laid 
down, but if it be printed anywhere, I have not 
met it ; nor have I had the fortune (after consult- 
ing the books) to meet any accounts of goat which 
essentially add to what has been said already by 
Audubon ; and that is somewhat meagre. Many 
pictures there are, much better than his old- 
fashioned plates, but further solid information is 
uncommonly scarce. Even the latest and most 
official authorities, when you test their pages by 
an intimate searching for a piece of comprehensive 
and definite information, do not give you that 
information. 

If my surmise be true, and sheep and goat are 
apt to be upon strained relations, I think we may 
be certain which of the two has regulated the 
affair. I will hazard the guess that in single com- 
bat the goat could ruin the sheep before the 



The White Goat lyj 

sheep was fully aware of what had befallen him. 
Hunters can picture such an encounter, which 
probably would be brief if grand. The gallant 
old sheep would stand, aim, bound to the attack 
and leap in the air, expecting to dash his forehead 
and curling horns against the face and horns of 
the goat. But the goat — ah! that's not the 
goat's way. It would have happened so quickly 
as not to be made out; but there the poor ram 
would lie, ripped open. The goat does nothing 
so picturesque and unpractical as jumping in the 
air. He lowers his sullen head, one shrewd thrust 
and jerk-back with his deadly sharp horns, and 
the business is despatched. And the goat looks 
it, too. His appearance suggests immediately 
that you had better look out for him if you 
happen to be a ram with beautiful useless horns 
— useless, that is, against any such apparatus as 
the goat carries. One day I stood watching a 
good specimen yyiW^-Oreammis. The nanny, less 
conspicuous, lay in the shade on some flat ground, 
asleep. But the billy sat hunched on the peak of 
a built-up pyramid of rocks. It was in the Zoo- 
logical Gardens at Philadelphia where this pair, 
taken into captivity in 1901, have grown and 
thrived, but have not bred. The billy shows his for- 



238 The White Goat 

midable nature ; no strangers can go near him ; he 
would disembowel them in a jiffy ; even his keeper 
has to be wary. At the top of his pile of rocks sat 
the captive, hunched, as I have said, and truculent 
and lowering, in spite of his stillness. His eye 
had that gaze which so wonderfully remains with 
wild animals who are prisoned from the great free 
natural spaces that belong to them, whose birth- 
right is a liberty of no sparrow-and-robin size, but 
a colossal liberty, the range of the primal world, 
where fences and statutes are not. Our delight- 
fully conventional intelligence is familiar with 
this look in the eyes of the lion and the eagle 
because the poets have called our attention to it, 
have said pretty things about it ; but if you have 
the unusual gift of making your own observations, 
you will find it in many other animals, including 
certain types of man. As for this goat, no goat 
sitting on a rock at Harlem could stare like him ; 
he might have been sitting on the top of the 
Cascade Mountains, surveying huge gulfs, and 
(possibly) meditating how improving it would be 
to disembowel a ram. 

As I watched him, an odd thought revisited 
me : how Asiatic he looked, for some obscure 
reason ! I remembered thinking this same thing 



The White Goat 239 

when I had shot my first goat eleven years 
before. Asiatic ? Yes ; and I cannot at all ex- 
plain why, unless it be that one has seen pic- 
tures of animals which hail from somewhere like 
Tibet, and which bear some resemblance to the 
Oreamntis. I know that no other of our Western 
big game strike me in this way ; buffalo, elk, deer, 
antelope, sheep, — all these have always seemed 
to me to look indigenous, to belong to our North 
American soil. But this goat is a figure that 
it surprises me to meet among the haunts of my 
own language ; his idiom should be Mongolian ! 
He's white, all white, and shaggy, and twice as 
large as any goat you ever saw. His white hair 
hangs long all over him, like a Spitz dog's or an 
Angora cat's; but it is stiff and coarse, not silky, 
and against its shaggy white mass the blackness 
of his hoofs, and horns, and nose, looks particularly 
black. His legs are thick, his neck is thick, every- 
thing about him is thick, saving only his thin 
black horns. They're generally about six inches 
long, they spread very slightly, and they curve 
slightly backward. At their base they are a little 
rough, but as they rise they cylindrically smooth 
and taper to an ugly point. His hoofs are heavy, 
broad, and blunt. The track they make is huge, 



240 The White Goat 

and precisely the reverse of the sheep's ; it is a 
capital V, pointing backward. The sheep's track 
is a V also, but pointing forward. By his clumsy- 
looking hoofs, and his thick-set and apparently 
unwieldy legs, it would seem as though this goat 
had best keep his level, as though he might sel- 
dom go up two steps of even a porch without 
accident ; a set of legs and hoofs could scarce 
be instanced of seemingly less avail for a moun- 
taineer. So, at least, I should argue, recalling the 
various sharp apparatus which we need ourselves. 
One does not see how these heavy animals can 
leap and cling. But let me transcribe uncor- 
rected some sentences from my hunting journal 
of November, 1892, pencilled in flippant spirit 
after a day's pursuit of the goat. 

" They . . . chose places to lie down where fall- 
ing off was the easiest thing you could do. . . . 
The individual tracks we have passed always 
choose the inclined plane where they have a 
choice between that and the level. ... I sup- 
pose these animals sometimes must fall, though 
they have a projecting heel of horn to their hoof 
which is wonderfully adapted to their vertical 
habits. But if they do fall, it probably amuses 
them. Their hair is more impenetrably thick 



The White Goat 241 

than any hair I have seen, and beneath this 
is the hide thicker than buffalo. If they play 
games together, it is probably to push each other 
over a precipice, and the goat that takes longest 
to walk up again loses the game." 

You can see from these lines what a tide of 
resentment flows between them. I remember 
that hard but successful day very well ; and it 
furnished some facts about size and weight and 
so on, which were all recorded on the spot, and 
which give some good details well to know. 

To begin with, there is that " projecting heel of 
horn " to the goat's hoof. We cannot imagine 
how he manages to make such a slight thing 
(not over a quarter of an inch) catch his weight. 
He weighs anywhere from one hundred and 
eighty to three hundred pounds. I had no means 
that day on top of the Cascade Mountains to 
ascertain how much the male I had killed might 
weigh, but he was very much of a load for two 
of us to move. His hide (not the hair but the 
leather) on his rump was as thick as the sole of 
my boot. My boot was made for climbing moun- 
tains, and the sole was filled with hobnails; the 
hide was as thick as such a sole, and when bal- 
anced against things in camp whose weight we 



242 The White Goat 

knew, — such as flour and sugar bags, — it alone 
weighed thirty pounds ! We carried home, be- 
side the head and hide, the web-tallow, and this 
was three-quarters of an inch thick. Hunters 
will know what ample supply this means in 
animals much larger than the goat. This speci- 
men was, my most companionable guide told me, 
of good but not supreme size. We carried home 
none of the meat. The flesh of the grown-up 
goat cannot be eaten with much pleasure ; but 
later, for the sake of a complete set of specimens, 
I shot a kid ; and the flesh of this we ate with 
entire satisfaction for our Thanksgiving dinner. 
And this brings me to the next point. 

" These wild goat," says my journal, " are twice 
the size and more of the ordinary goat, and if 
their hides kept clean and snow-white as they 
naturally are, they would be a splendid-looking 
animal." 

This was written two weeks before I was able 
to examine one that was in very truth snow- 
white ; and lately, while looking through the 
books to find what they have to say that may 
fill out my imperfect knowledge, I have come 
more than once on the statement that the goat 
is not pure white, but has a tinge of yellow, or 



The White Goat 243 

some shade, here and there, that dulls his total 
sheen. This I conceive to be error. Age, it is 
possible, may bring a few dark hairs to the white 
goat But I should wish to be very sure about 
this before I asserted it. The sum of my experi- 
ence is, that first I killed some plainly old male 
goats (they were off by themselves, no longer 
with the herd), and of these the coats were 
dingy; that presently I found a plainly younger 
male goat (he was lighter in weight and his 
horns and hoofs showed less wear), and his coat 
was spotless ; and that finally I found the coat of 
a kid born that same year to be equally spotless. 
What is the inference — almost the conclusion.? 
Is it not that in the older goats the color was 
discoloration, from causes external ; that by nature 
the goat is perfectly white ; and that the books 
have gone on reproducing an original mistake 
which grew from some writer's having seen only 
goats that were weather-stained ? Oh, the repro- 
duction of error ! The way one man's inaccurate 
statement is blandly copied down by the next 
man, and verification shirked at every turn ! 
Why will they do it, these little scientific folk .? 
For the great ones never do. The great ones 
verify, or else, when they come to a hole in their 



244 The White Goat 

knowledge, they frankly tell you that they don't 
know. They paste no piece of paper over the 
hole, pretending it's all solid underneath. But 
the small fry — the popular magazine size, — 
these unceasingly are pasting paper. And why t 
Because they're not afraid of being found out. 
They know how few of their readers can dis- 
cover the holes and poke their fingers through 
the paper. Don't you believe me, reader ? Does 
your kind heart repudiate with heat this asper- 
sion } Perhaps — for instance — you're not aware 
how some little writers go on deriving the 
name of a well-known St. Lawrence fish from 
two French words, masque allongee. I would 
tell you about it, only I did not discover 
their ludicrous blunder myself ; but here's a 
hole where I happened to poke my own finger 
through the paper. During ten years I used 
every official map of Wyoming that I could 
procure. First it was a territory, and next a 
state, but all the while the map-makers con- 
tinued to draw Pacific Creek as flowing into 
Buffalo Fork. Now Pacific Creek is a thorough- 
fare between the two sides of the Continental 
Divide, and it does not flow into Buffalo Fork, 
but into Snake River. It was a really bad geo- 



The White Goat 245 

graphical mistake. Some original map-maker 
had traced his map on hearsay or guesswork, 
hadn't gone down the creek to see for himself, 
and all his successors faithfully reproduced his 
ignorance. The people who knew better were 
merely Indians, prospectors, cowboys, or stray 
hunters like myself. We didn't count; that 
wasn't being found out ! 

Pacific Creek being wrong to a certainty, how 
then about Atlantic Creek, and Thoroughfare, 
and a good many more ? Did these, also, flow 
one way officially, and actually another.? How 
could I be sure until I had crossed mountains 
and found them for myself? And how should 
you, reader, enjoy being condemned to such 
maps in a country where Indians, and bears, and 
blizzards prevailed ? You will scarce wonder 
that I grew to place upon those maps the same 
chastened reliance that I place to-day upon books 
which tell me that the goat is not strictly white, 
or that he lives in the Rocky Mountains. You 
might search a good many hundred miles of 
Rocky Mountains that have never seen a goat, 
but which the sheep has frequented since before 
the memory of man. Here again comes the con- 
trast between the two: having come the same 



246 The White Goat 

road from Kamchatka, their ranges upon this 
continent but partially coincide, and even where 
both animals are established and flourishing in 
the same zone, their localities within that zone 
are so capriciously separated as to baffle even the 
explanation that one drives the other out. 

It would seem that they can stand equal cold ; 
both are to be found in Alaska, as might be 
expected from the manner of their emigration. 
And beginning with Alaska (one authority, R. 
Lydekker, " The Royal Natural History," London, 
1898, the best authority I have found for co- 
herence and completeness, names latitude 64° as 
the northern limit), we find goat and sheep alike 
plentifully distributed as we come south. But 
only for a certain distance. If the Northwest be 
plain like a picture in your mind's eye, you can 
recall how in the far North the Cascades and 
Rockies are intermingled, and how, as we come 
down through British Columbia to our own soil, 
they gradually separate, slope apart, so that by 
the time they reach the latitude of Portland, 
Oregon, a wide, flat domain lies between them. 
Both have slanted inland; but while the Cascades 
are only some hundred and sixty miles from the 
Pacific coast, the Rockies are away over in Idaho 



The White Goat 247 

and Montana, and continue to diverge until they 
sink among the hot sands of the mesquite and 
the yucca. Now, in Arizona, in the Colorado 
Canon for instance, we still find the sheep, and 
can find him yet farther down in northwest 
Mexico. But no goat is so far south. The goat 
stops more than a thousand miles to the north. 
It seems clear, then, that goat and sheep will 
inhabit equal cold, but not equal heat. 

Where, exactly, does the goat stop.? That is 
something which no book (that I have seen) will 
tell you. The London book, which I have quoted 
already, names latitude 40° as the southern limit 
of his habitat. This is considerably farther south 
than I have ever heard of him. My knowledge 
.of him goes no farther south than the Saw Tooth 
Range, which is in Idaho. These sharp ridges 
nourish the head waters of the Salmon River, 
and are in the southern-central part of the state. 
And I am inclined to say, in spite of Mr. Lydek- 
ker, but supported by Mr. Arthur Brown, that 
the Saw Tooth and Salmon River country in 
Idaho is about the southeastern corner of the 
goat's province. Saving stray and accidental 
individuals, you are not likely to find him be- 
yond that point, south or east. I have never 



248 The PVhite Goat 

talked with any hunter who had seen him in 
Wyoming, although (and here again I will re- 
enforce my own experience with Mr. Brown's) 
there seems to be a sort of goat tradition in 
Wyoming, here and there. This myth is, to be 
sure, highly sublimated. You don't hear that 
goat used to be upon this or that definite moun- 
tain, or that So-and-So saw a man who saw a 
goat, or whose wife or uncle saw one; it never 
comes as near you as that ; yet still faintly in the 
air of the Continental Divide there hovers this 
vague rumor of the animal. 

If he was ever in Wyoming as a domiciled 
resident, who shall say why he departed 1 Why 
is he not to-day upon the Washakie Needle, or 
in the abrupt country where heads Green River, 
or among the formidable Tetons, since to-day he 
is but a little farther west of the Tetons, in the 
Saw Tooth Range } And why, if man (or sheep) 
drove him from these Wyoming peaks, has he 
not been driven from the peaks of Idaho ? Dif- 
ference in neither heat, nor cold, nor humidity, 
nor accessibility, can be the explanation, for there 
is no difference; and as for difference in food, I 
find no suggestion of it in the pages of the 
authorities. 



The White Goat 249 

" What they eat in winter is a mystery. But 
it must be the Httle knobs of moss that grow at 
the edges of the steep rocks on top, where the 
snow cannot lie. They never come down into 
the valleys, as the mountain sheep do when the 
snow grows deep up above." 

This is no authority, but merely my camp note- 
book again ; and the statement that the goat is 
never, like the sheep, driven to low pastures by 
the snow is but the popular account of him that 
I was able to gather from the inhabitants — the 
prospectors, the trappers — of the mountains 
where I hunted him. Yet it is interesting; and 
if generally true, it may furnish some clue to the 
capricious local separations between sheep and 
soat in the zone of their common habitat. But 
if the goat cannot, when the weather would drive 
him down, subsist upon the less lofty growths 
that then satisfy the sheep, you will remark how 
truly unlike the real goat is this narrow discrimi- 
nation as to diet. 

It is surprising, indeed, that at this late day, 
when investigation and verification are so easy, 
no naturalist seems anywhere to have written a 
plain, complete paragraph answering the plain, 
natural question : In what states and territories 



250 The White Goat 

does the white goat live? It would seem the 
naturalist's business to tell us this. We have the 
right to expect to open some single standard 
book, and find such facts at once. Well, I have 
had to open eight, gathering here a fact and there 
J a fact in a manner not unlike the painful process 
of rag-picking. The result is far from covering 
the ground ; let me acknowledge this, and beg 
friendly correction and amplification, — and let 
me say, nevertheless, that the following is the 
most detailed information to be found so far 
set down in any one place. 

In Alaska and British Columbia we find the 
goat, and in northwest Montana, and in Idaho, 
but only in spots ; he is also in the northern 
Cascades in Washington, but, oddly enough it ap- 
pears, not in the Olympic Range. Nor is he in 
the southern Cascades, in Oregon. Elsewhere 
he is not, unless possibly in California. There 
is an ancient legend of him among the higher 
mountains of that state ; the Spanish Padre de 
Salvatierra and his fellow-missionary, Padre Pic- 
colo, are supposed to have seen him. We must 
uselessly wonder if they did ; and I should have 
been more indebted to a foot-note in the " Bio- 
logical Survey of Mount Shasta," which touches 



The White Goat 251 

upon the goat's habitat in Oregon and Wash- 
ington, were it not wholly silent as to the 
animal's presence or absence, past or present, 
in the state of California. 

The farther we follow the story of the white 
goat, the more do we find his steps attended with 
the mists of confusion ; and for the gloomy critic 
this would be a timely moment to write some 
sentences about the longevity of error. But it 
all came out right in the end ; and we will get 
to the facts at once, and how I first began to 
meet the stream of uncertainty of which the 
fountain-source lies in the old romantic pages of 
Lewis and Clark. 

A while ago I spoke of a goat tradition in 
Wyoming. Now it was not until the fall of 1889 
that I believed there was such a thing as this 
goat anywhere. I thought — I could not then 
say why — that the unlettered mountaineers and 
plainsmen, whose talk I heard, were speaking of 
the sheep ; and, also, they contradicted each other 
in a way so curious and persistent that the animal 
became in a manner fabulous to me, like the uni- 
corn, or the wool-bearing horse. Now I would 
meet the assurance that " over there somewhere," 
among the mountains near the Pacific, a snow- 



252 The White Goat 

white goat lived, with long hair; again, I would 
meet a positive denial of this. Some sceptical 
old trapper or prospector would proclaim that he 
" guessed he had been most everywhere," and no- 
body could " fool him about no goat " with long 
hair. Indeed, when I at last laid my own goat 
trophies, heads and hides, before the eyes of my 
old friend John Yancey of the Yellowstone Park, 
they gave him a genuine sensation. He had 
wasted small faith in any tales of goat. He stared 
at them, he touched them, he lifted them, he 
could not get over it ; they caused me to rise in 
his esteem, and he refused to believe that circum- 
venting a mountain sheep is a far more skilful 
exploit. He, too, like myself, had supposed that 
in some way this notion about goats could be 
traced to mountain sheep, and that they were one 
and the same animal. I found this error spread 
eastward to great cities. 

In the front hall of a certain club there used to 
hang — and still hangs, for all I know — the head 
of a white goat. I stood near it one day in 1894 
or 1895, while two gentlemen were looking at it. 
One had hunted in our West, and was asked by 
the other what animal this was. He replied with 
certainty, " A mountain sheep." It was no busi- 




THE WHITE GOAT IS AN AGILE CLIMBER 



The IVhite Goat 255 

ness of mine, and I did not correct him. But 
how inveterate and singular was the confusion ! 
for these two wild animals do not resemble each 
other a particle more than do their domestic 
namesakes. In the hall of the club that day I 
did not know that, ninety years before, the self- 
same blunder had been made and written down 
for the first time, and that we were still inherit- 
ing its consequences. 

On September twenty-six, 1805, Meriwether 
Lewis, quite inconveniently sick, was, with his 
equally inconveniently sick comrades, camped for 
the purpose of building canoes. They lay at the 
confluence of the north fork with the main stream 
of that river which Idaho now most often calls the 
Clearwater, and which the Indians then called 
the Kooskooskee. They had come overland a 
great way — two thousand miles — walking and 
riding. They had lately been high among the 
cold snows, and they were now abruptly plunged 
in the flat climate of the plains. Heat and the 
copious new food made every mother's son of 
them ill. But a few days before this, and they 
had been sparingly serving out rations of horse 
flesh to keep together soul and body; now the 
Indians have given them all the salmon they can 



256 The White Goat 

swallow, and taught them to eat the camass, a 
precarious vegetable. In the language of Doc- 
tor Coues (the admirable annotator of the 1894 
edition, one can hardly imagine a better and 
honester piece of work) : " Having been neither 
frozen nor starved quite to death — having sur- 
vived camass roots, tartar emetic, and Rush's 
pills (the famous Dr. Rush of Philadelphia,) the 
explorers have reached navigable Columbian 
waters. ..." I could quote from this splendid 
book forever. It is our American Robinson 
Crusoe. Somebody, no doubt, will grind it into 
a historical novel ; but no novel, no matter how 
big a sale it has, can spoil the journal of Lewis 
and Clark. Well, at this sick camp, while they're 
making ready to float to Astoria, enter the white 
goat. It is his first recorded appearance. 

Says Gass : " There appears to be a kind of 
sheep in this country, besides the ibex or moun- 
tain sheep, and which have wool on. I saw some 
of the skins, which the natives had, with wool 
four inches long, and as fine, white, and soft as 
any I had ever seen." 

Here, you perceive, is the error, appearing 
simultaneously with thegoat. 

These sheep " live," says the text in another 



The White Goat 257 

place, "in greater numbers on that chain of 
mountains which forms the commencement of 
the woody country on the coast and passes the 
Columbia between the falls and rapids." Accu- 
rate in everything save the name. 

Next comes the observation (William Dunbar 
and Dr. Hunter) written on the Columbia River 
near the Dalles : " We here saw the skin of a 
mountain sheep, which they say lives among the 
rocks in the mountains; the skin was covered 
with white hair; the wool was long, thick, and 
coarse, with long, coarse hair on the top of the 
neck and on the back, resembling somewhat the 
bristles of a goat." 

This time, you see, they are on the very edge 
of getting the thing straight. But no; they 
recede again, after the following which seems to 
promise complete clearing up : — 

" A Canadian, who had been much with the 
Indians to the westward, speaks of a wool-bearing 
animal larger than a sheep, the wool much mixed 
with_hair, which he had seen in large flocks." 

April ten, 1806, the party is on its return jour- 
ney. It has successfully wintered on the coast, 
and has now come up the Columbia again, fifty 
miles above Vancouver. 



258 The White Goat 

" While we were at breakfast one of the In- 
dians offered us two sheepskins for sale; . . . 
the second was smaller .... with the horns re- 
maining. . . . The horns of the animal were 
black, smooth, and erect; they rise from the 
middle of the forehead, a little above the eyes, 
in a cylindrical form, to the height of four inches, 
where they are pointed." 

Here there is no mistake about the mistake; 
he describes a goat and calls it^a sheep. Why 
he should do this when he had seen the bighorn 
constantly during his journey up the Missouri 
may possibly be thus explained : He says that 
he did not think the bighorn much like a sheep, 
and so, perhaps, the goat did not strike him as 
much like a goat; we know it happens to be 
an antelope. But however we account for this 
original mixing of names, it is easy to perceive 
how good a start the mixing got ; and after read- 
ing the text of the old confusion, is it not odd 
and interesting to trace it down through the 
years, down through Yancey, to the front hall of 
the club ? to find it cropping up among all sorts 
and conditions of men, now in a city and now on 
top of the Wind River Mountains, where it used 
to perplex me 1 



The White Goat 259 

And this is only the popular side of it; the 
scholars have been just as mixed as Yancey. 
The scientific side of the story is picturesquely 
seen through the dynasty of Latin names succes- 
sively lavished upon the goat. 

The country at large first heard of t he go at in 
1806, when Thomas Jefferson accompanied his 
message to Congress about Lewis and Clark's 
exploration with various documents, and among 
these the observations of William Dunbar and 
Dr. Hunter. Nine years later the eminent 
George Ord gave to the animal his first aca- 
demic baptism, and he appeared as Ovis mon- 
tana. Pretty soon M. de Blainville seems to 
have called him Antilope americana^ and Rupi- 
capra americana. By 181 7 he was known as 
Mazama Sericea — which is wandering pretty 
wide of the family. Four years more, and he is 
plain Rocky Mountain sheep. Next follow Capra 
montana, Antilope la7iigera^ Capra Americana, 
and Haplocerus montaiius. This last was begin- 
ning to look permanent, when it was discovered 
that somebody had for some time been styling 
the goat by a well-devised appellation, to wit, 
Oreamnus mojitantis. He goes by that now ; 
and it may be doubted if any thief has more 



26o The IVhite Goat 

frequently employed an alias than this probably 
blameless animal. Such is the story of the con- 
fusion begun — we can only guess why — by 
Lewis and Clark, and not cleared up until our 
own day. 

The goat is an animal far less wary than the 
sheep. His watch is concentrated upon ap- 
proaches from below. All the hunter has to do 
is to get above him, to make at once for the 
summit of the ridge which he proposes to hunt, 
and the unsuspecting creature will never give you 
a thought. Upon my word, it is inexcusable to 
kill him, except for a specimen in a collection ; 
he is so handsome, so harmless, and so stupid ! 
And in his remoter haunts, where the nature of 
man is still a closed book to him, he* "thinketh 
no evil " ; he will stand looking at the hunter 
with a sedate interest in his large, deep brown 
eyes. The tenderfoot sportsman, it seems, will 
generally make his beginnings as a maniac. Sud- 
denly confronted with a herd of wild animals, he 
frantically pumps his repeating rifle, hypnotized 
by the glut of destruction. Luckily, he is apt, in 
his excitement, to miss. His desire is for no one 
special trophy, but for a hot killing of all in sight. 
If we are not to blame him for this flare of blind 



The Whiie Goat 261 

brute instinct, for heaven's sake don't let us praise 
the performance ! The best that can possibly be 
said for it is to call it the seamy side of masculin- 
ity ; and the searny^sicif of masculinity fits coward- 
ice like a glove. I am speaking from the sinner's 
bench ; and long back in the years (not so long 
materially, but miles and miles every other way) 
I see one or two spots of shame. To-day, my 
wish is to photograph the game, and let him go 
his way in peace. 

With my rifle I carried a kodak among the 
goats. The kodak and the rifle made a dis- 
comfortable pair now and then. For instance : — 

" Saturday twelfth (November) four and one-half 
hours' climb up opposite ridge, so as to get above 
goat seen yesterday. Snow six and eight inches 
deep on top." This was a day that I carried 
both instruments, and the rocks continually 
required the use of both hands. Well, I got 
the goat that I wanted with my rifle. I took 
the kodak home with one hundred pictures of 
my very long, hard, interesting journey. It was 
the year that the company's films were bad, and I 
drew one hundred blanks ; there was not the 
semblance of an image upon a single one. The 
same mischance had attended the Greely expedi; 



262 The White Goat 

tion, and I had not travelled as far as they did ; 
so you see my mouth must utter no complaints. 
No ; my mileage fell short of the Greely expe- 
dition ; but no goat will ever tempt me through 
such adventures again. Alas, that a man should 
come to shrink from discomforts which once 
— but let me tell you about some of them. 

Because nothing but good fellowship and 
kindness were shown me there, I suppress the 
name of the town at the railroad's end where 
I waited from Saturday till Monday for the north- 
bound stage. It was Saturday, October ninth, my 
journal reminds me. 

" They gave me a room. ... I was glad to 
see as little of it as possible. I washed in the 
public trough and basin which stood in the office 
between the saloon and the dining room ; and 
I spent my time either in the saloon watching a 
game of poker that never ceased, or in wander- 
ing about in the world outside. A Chinaman 
named Madden . . . played poker and of course 
lost to his American friends, . . . swearing in 
the most ludicrous jargon. . . . Yet he was good- 
natured . . . the men seemed to like him ... at 
night he returned to the never ending game and 
lost some more. ... I went to my room to go 



The White Goat 263 

to bed, turned down the bed clothes, and saw 
there, not what I feared, but cockroaches to the 
number of several thousand, I should think. 
They scampered frantically, jostling each other 
like any other crowd. Then I lifted one pillow 
and watched more cockroaches hurry under the 
neighboring pillow for shelter. Then I saw that 
the walls, ceiling, and floor were all quivering 
and sparkling with cockroaches. So I told the 
landlord downstairs. I said that if he had no 
other room, I would throw my camp blankets 
on the office table and sleep there if he had no 
objection. He was sympathetic, and explained 
that the cockroaches must have come up from 
the kitchen which was below my room. This 
was Saturday night, and every Saturday night 
the cook put powder in the kitchen ; so that must 
have sent them up. This explanation was given 
me in a voice full of condolence. And I replied 
that very likely this was how they came and that 
sleeping in bed with so many at a time would 
be impossible. He entirely agreed with me. 
' Yes,' he said, ' cockroaches is hell.' . . . 

" So I unrolled my blankets and the landlord 
helped me make my bed on his office table, lift- 
ing the inkstands and newspapers for me. . . . 



264 The White Goat 

I went to sleep, hearing the game of poker in the 
adjoining room, the gobbling of Madden when 
he lost, and the hoarse merriment of the other 
men at his gibberish. 

" Sunday. . . . This morning the game was 
still going on, but Madden had retired about 
four o'clock a loser. The bar-tender, sweeping 
the office, waked me, and I arose and made a 
toilet, as usual, in the public trough." 

The retrospect fills me with merriment — 
and regret that it's all over for ever and ever; 
and the goat does not live for whose sake I 
would do it again. 

It is hard not to yield to further temptation, 
not to transcribe from that diary of 1892 much 
more about the appearance and customs of the 
strange wild country through which I now passed 
on my way to the goat. Some of the landscape 
was the worst, the forlornest, the most worthless 
that I know, far outstripping Nevada in sheer 
meanness, and as desolate as Arizona, without 
Arizona's magic splendor and fascination. Great 
deserts without grandeur, great valleys without 
charm, great rocks without dignity, mere lonely 
ugliness everywhere ; that is the Big Bend coun- 
try ; and the river Columbia itself, when you finally 



The White Goat 265 

descend to it from the parched bare dust and the 
strewn black boulders of the table-land, is a 
sweeping, sullen, shadeless flood, the most un-^ 
lovely river that ever I have seen. 

I like, when I can, to bring support to my 
opinions. On a later day, in the middle of the 
Big Bend, I came upon a desolate sign-post, 
placed there no doubt to cheer up the wayfarer's 
discouraged heart. This post announced that 
Central Ferry was thirty-five miles distant; and 
below this a wayfarer had scrawled his personal 
comment : — 

Forty-five miles to water. 
And a subsequent wayfarer had added: — 

Seventy-five miles to wood. 
And a final wayfarer : — 

Two and one-half miles to hell. 

Ah, the dauntless, invaluable spirit of man! 
Those few words scrawled by a hand that I 
should like to shake, made the desert blossom 
with humor, and I continued on my journey with 
a smiling heart. 

Three nights out from the cockroaches, and I 
was sleeping in the open, among pleasant hills. 



266 The IVhite Goat 

An old ragged fiddler, with hair hanging grizzled 
to his shoulders, had kept me listening late to 
all sorts of old-fashioned tunes and dances. He 
had fiddled his way across our continent, and 
had taken his lifetime to do so. Here he was, 
with silvering hair, up in the Cascade Moun- 
tains. I spread my blankets a hundred yards 
from his cabin, where he lived alone. He was 
perfectly blithe-hearted and perfectly penniless. 
I don't know his name ; I never saw him but 
that once ; I suppose he is dead ; but his dis- 
course and his fiddle gave me an evening of 
entertainment over which I still sometimes dwell. 
Had I found no goat, the characters that I met, 
such as he, would have rewarded my excursion. 
But all things came to me. After some vain 
trips, whence I returned empty handed from 
fairly rough camping, on Wednesday, Novem- 
ber 2, the diary reads, " One of my particular long- 
cherished wishes is accomplished, and I have 
seen and killed a mountain goat." On the next 
day a second head and hide hung in our very 
snug camp. These first two were males, and 
they served as a basis for the description that 
I have attempted to draw earlier in this chapter. 
It was while we sat, my companionable guide 



The White Goat 267 

and I, skinning the second goat, that we held a 
conversation which I must here record. 

How we ever fell upon such a subject as the 
royal family of England, I do not remember; 
but camping in the wilderness uses up subjects, 
and leaves you with a steadily narrowing choice 
each day; and T — , who took an illustrated 
paper, observed to me that he had always rather 
liked " that chap Lome." This was how he 
phrased it; his language about some of the 
others held less of compliment. 

Now I had happened, not long before this, to 
read of a distressing contretemps that had be- 
fallen the procession during the Queen's jubilee, 
and I reminded T — of this ; but it was new to 
him. So I told him that while the crowned 
heads were proceeding in state through London 
streets with the eyes of the civilized world watch- 
ing them with admiration, the Marquis of Lome's 
horse kicked up. It was a horse that required 
a better rider than the Prince of Wales had con- 
sidered the marquis to be, for he had warned 
him against the animal beforehand. But the 
marquis preferred to ride him. And so the horse 
kicked up, and off fell the marquis, right in the 
middle of the Queen's jubilee. 



268 The White Goat 

T — looked at me and said nothing. I was 
therefore left uncertain if it came home to the 
mind of the mountaineer that this royal progress, 
this historic and panoplied moment, was a bad 
one for a nobleman to select to tumble off his 
horse in. I continued : — 

" I believe that the Queen, upon seeing the 
accident, sent somebody.'' 

" Where ? " said T— . 

" To the marquis. She probably called the 
nearest King and said, ' Frederick, Lome's off. 
Go and see if he's hurt' " 

" ' And if he ain't hurt, hurt him,' " added T — , 
speaking for the Queen. So I perceived that he 
had given the situation its full value. 

After this second day of success, storm and 
snow beat down upon us, a blinding day, keep- 
ing us in camp. More storms followed, and no 
more goat; and we had to shoot a horse which 
had " cast " himself, being entangled in his rope, 
and so frozen as he lay helpless overnight in the 
heavy snow. We left these mountains and de- 
parted to others in search of a herd of goat; 
I wished a female and kid, and we seemed to 
have lighted upon a resort of old solitary males. 
Eight days after the second goat we sighted our 



The PVbite Goat i6g 

herd, and this occasioned an experience more 
enlightening. 

I feel confident that those who have done 
much hunting of big game have sometimes 
heard such words as these : " This mountain used 
to have a bunch of sheep on it all the time; three 
hundred sheep ; " or, " Just about here last season 
I ran into a band of twelve hundred elk ; " or, 
" I passed two thousand antelope on the flat 
yesterday." The person who says this to you 
will have been your own guide, or some visitor 
to camp who is comparing notes and exchang- 
ing anecdotes. I, at any rate, have listened many 
times to such assertions; and now and then I 
have been tempted to observe (for instance) in 
reply : " Two thousand antelope ! When you'd 
counted nineteen hundred and ninety-nine, I 
should think you'd have been too tired to go on." 
But these are temptations that I have resisted. 
I think, too, that the men believed what they 
said — in a general way. But here with the 
goat was a famous opportunity. We could see 
them clearly ; they were across a canon from our- 
selves, a mile or so away; they were lying down, 
or standing, some eating, some slowly moving 
about a little; they were in crowds, and in smaller 



270 The IVhite Goat 

groups, and by ones and twos, changing their 
positions very leisurely; and they seemed num- 
berless ; they were up and down the hill every- 
where. Getting to them this day was not 
possible, since most of the day was already gone, 
and we were high up on an opposite mountain 
side. 

" There's a hundred thousand goat ! " exclaimed 
T — ; and I should have gone home asseverating 
that I had seen at least hundreds. 

" Let's count them," said I. We took the 
glasses and did so. There were thirty-five. 

From these thirty-five during the next two 
days I completed with no trouble, save hard 
climbing, my tally of desired specimens, — an 
adult male and female, and a kid, for my own 
keeping, with two males to give away to friends. 
And I learned a little more about the goat. 

The female is lighter built than the male, and 
with horns more slender — a trifle. And (to re- 
turn to the question of diet) we visited the pas- 
ture where the herd had been, and found no sign 
of grass growing, or grass eaten; there was no 
grass on that mountain. The only edible sub- 
stance was a moss, tufted, stiff, and dry to the 
touch. The largest horns at the base measured 



The White Goat 271 

six inches in circumference, and twenty-one and 
a half inches from one tip down to the skull and 
so across and up to the other tip. I also learned 
that the goat is safe from predatory animals. 
With his impenetrable hide and his disembowel- 
ling horns, he is left by the wolves and mountain 
lions respectfully alone. And T — told me of a 
mother goat's energy. A prospector had in early 
summer captured a kid still too young to run 
much. Its mother saw him taking it to camp, 
ran after him, chased him in full sight of his 
comrades so hotly that he had to drop her child, 
and she got it back ! I have said by inference, 
but must definitely state, that the kids are 
dropped in May and June. 

To the sum of our knowledge about the 
Oreamnus montanus, the gift of a subspecies 
has lately been offered ; but acceptance of this 
gift would at present, I think, be premature. It 
depends on one's idea of the number of facts 
needful in daily life to justify a generalization. 
For instance, if you should read in the paper 
that one person died of diphtheria last week in 
New York, it would not prevent your going to 
that city; but if you read that five hundred had 
died in a week, you might decide not to take 



272 The White Goat 

your children there for the season, — and this 
would be the result of a justifiable generalization. 
The rule is nowise different in genuine science. 
This new variety of goat has been based upon a 
single specimen, and only the dried skull at that ! 
Because the horns were a few inches longer and 
spread a few inches wider than the average, and 
because there were certain differences in measure- 
ment of the jaw, is scarce adequate proof that 
these variations were not a distortion, congenital 
or the result of accident. We have seen people 
with squints and with club-feet; we have also 
been to the circus, yet we do not make sub- 
species for the Kentucky giant and the bearded 
lady. But that little ache for self-perpetuation, 
for some sort of permanence in this forgetting 
world, throbs in many hearts, and since we are 
all trying to affix our names to something that 
will hand them down to the succeeding genera- 
tions, why not tie them to Oreamnus and Ovis? 
And so, reader, you have the pleasing vision of 
our zoologists, riding down to posterity upon the 
backs of sundry subspecies of goat and sheep. 

These animals, like all our Western big game, 
are disappearing. It is not (as the political 
Western loud-talker has so frequently shouted) 



The White Goat 273 

the Eastern " tenderfoot " who is responsible for 
this destruction; it is the Westerner himself, 
quietly breaking the laws he made, and killing 
(to take one recent example) dozens of bull elk 
out of season in Jackson's Hole, Wyoming, merely 
to sell the two teeth known as " tushes," and leav- 
ing the rest of the carcass to rot on the hills. 
That is the real man who is destroying our big 
game, just as he is wiping out our forests. Left 
in his hands, the face of our continent would 
presently look like a burnt house. Two years 
before I hunted the goat, the deer in those moun- 
tains came down in herds to stare at the new set- 
tlers — who shot them from their cabin doors for 
fun. The 'deer are scarce enough now. 

The Yellowstone Park is a sanctuar)^ for 
buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, and sheep. There (if 
anywhere) our big game have a chance of surviv- 
ing. I have never heard of goat as existing in 
this sanctuary ; but good news comes lately that 
the sheep are thriving upon Mt. Evarts. Let me 
suggest to the commandant that he take steps to 
secure some goat from the Saw Tooth Range — 
or anywhere he best can — and try the interesting 
experiment of breeding the animal in the Yellow- 
stone Park. 



274 The White Goat 

ROCKY MOUNTAIN GOAT 

(Haplocerus montanus^) 

This is one of the very few mammals that are 
permanently white or whitish at all seasons, and 
although commonly termed a goat, it really belongs 
to the same group as the serows, which it closely 
resembles in the form and color of the horns. In 
winter the hair is very long, and pure white in 
color; along the back it is erect, and much elon- 
gated on the withers and haunches, so as to give 
to the animal the appearance of possessing a pair 
of humps. The summer coat is comparatively 
short, and has a yellowish tinge. Height at 
shoulder just short of 3 feet; weight from 180 to 
300 pounds. 

Distribution. — North America, throughout the 
Rocky Mountains, from about latitude 36° in Cali- 
fornia at least as far north as latitude 60°. By 
American naturalists the proper generic name of 
the animal is considered to be Oreamnus instead 
of Haplocerus. 

1 " Records of Big Game," Rowland Ward, third edition. 



The White Goat 

Measurements of Horns 



275 



Length 

ON Front 

Curve 


Circum- 
ference 


Tip to 
Tip 


Locality 


Owner 


-"i 






British Columbia 


Clive Phillipps-Wolley 


— II 






Kutenay, British 
Columbia 


John T. Fannin 
(measured by) 


-10^ 


51 




Montana 


Walter James 


lOi 


51 


5i 


British Columbia 


R. Rankin 


-loi 


6i 




Similkameen River, 
British Columbia 


Arthur Pearse 


loi 


5 


6i 


? 


E. N. Buxton 


-9ioi 


4| 




British Columbia 


Capt. A. Egerton 


ID 


5f 


6| 


British Columbia 


J. V. Colby 


-9f 


5 




Montana 


Theodore Roosevelt 


91 


51 


6i 


N.W. Territories 


S. Ratcliff 


9f 


5i 


6 


N.W. Territories 


H.R.H. le Due 
d'Orleans 


9l 


5i 


6i 


N.W. Territories 


Sir Edmund G. Loder, 
Bart. 


9\ 


5^ 


6i 


Alaska 


Sir George Littledale 


9\ 


4i 




North America 


J. D. Cobbold 


99h 


4i 


51 


British Columbia 


P. B. Vander-Byl 


9l 


5i 


6| 


East Kutenay, British 
Columbia 


A. E. Butter 


-9i 


Si 


6i 


Bitter Root Mts., 
U.S.A. 


James J. Harrison 


-99f 


4i 


5f 


British Columbia 


A. E. Leatham 


-9f 


Sf 


6| 


British Columbia 


T. W. H. Clarke 


9l 


5^ 


5i 


British Columbia 


J. Turner-Turner 


9i 


5i 




North America 


Earl of Lonsdale 


9\ 


5^ 


5? 


British Columbia 


G. Lloyd Graeme 


9t 




6 


Montana 


Thomas Bate, 
British Museum 


9i 


5i 


5 


British Columbia 


Sir Peter Walker, Bart. 


9 


4l 


6 


British Columbia 


T. P. Kempson 


-8| 


5i 


4|- 


British Columbia 


Count E. Hoyos 


8i 


4f 


5i 


British Columbia 


Count Schiebler 



INDEX 



Age indicated by rings on rams' 

horns, 208 n. 
Alaska, buffalo range as extending 

to, 123. 
Fossil remains of musk-oxen 

found in, 85. 
Mountain sheep in, 176, 181 «., 

223-224, 226, 246. 
Remains of buffaloes found in, 

123-124. 
Rumors of musk-oxen in, 85-93. 
White goat found in, 246, 250, 275. 
Alaskan bighorn \_Ovis canadensis 

dalli'], 176, 181 «., 223- 

224, 226, 246. 
Alces [Moose], I20. 
AUeghanies, the, eastern boundary 

of buffalo range, 1 20. 
Allen, Professor J. A., 79, 80. 

Monograph on American bisons 

by, 119. 
Animals, attachment of, to one 

locality, 138-146. 
Antelope, white goat an, 232. 
Antelope-hunting on horses, 197. 
Antilope americana, white goat 

termed, 259. 
Antilope lanigera, 259. 
Arctic islands, musk-oxen on, 51, 

60, 85, 93. 
Argalis, Asiatic, mountain sheep 

distinguished from, 223. 
Arizona, mountain sheep in, 247. 
Arkansas, musk-ox skull found in, 

85- 



Audubon, J. J., 122, 147. 

" Missouri River Journal " quoted, 

157-159- 
Aurochs, European bison called, 1 1 1. 
Aylmer Lake, musk-ox killed at, 94. 

Babiche, 41, 67. 

Bache Peninsula, musk-oxen killed 
on, 76-79. 

Bad Lands, mountain sheep in the, 
176. 

"Barren Ground of Northern Can- 
ada," W. Pike's, 47, 

Barren Grounds, hunting in, 17-29. 
Physical character of, 34-35. 
Route for best reaching, 50-51. 
Snowfall in, 35. 

Bear River Valley, buffalo formerly 
abundant in, 125. 

Bedson, S. L., experiments in breed- 
ing buffalo by, 148. 

Bent, George, 128. 

Bent, Colonel William, 128. 

Berlin, live musk-ox in, 103. 

Big Bend country, description of, 264. 

Bighorn, American \_Ovis canaden- 
sis'], 223-224. See Moun- 
tain sheep. 
Alaskan \_Ovis canadensis dalli], 
176, 181 n., 223-224, 226, 
246. 

" Biological Survey of Mount 
Shasta," 250. 

Birds, attachment of, to certain 
localities, 142. 



277 



278 



Index 



Bison, American \_Bos bisoii] , 1 1 1- 1 66. 
Mountain, 126, 135-136. 
Points distinguishing, from Euro- 
pean bison, 165, 
Prairie \_Bos bison (ypiciis'], 165. 
Reported relation of musk-ox 

to, 75. 
See Buffaloes. 
Bitter Root Mountains, white goat 

found in, 275. 
Blackfeet Indians, white buffalo skin 
dedicated to Sun by, 127. 
Blainville, M. de, 259. 
Bodfish, Captain H. H., 93, 103. 
Bonneville, Captain, on buffaloes in 

Bear River Valley, 125. 
Bos bison athabasca [Wood bison], 

117, 123, 165. 
Bos bison typicus [Prairie bison], 

165. 
British Columbia, mountain sheep 
in, 225, 226. 
White goat in, 231, 250, 275. 
Brown, Arthur, on southern range 

of white goat, 247. 
Brush, absence of, from Barren 

Grounds, 35-36. 
" Buck-fever," 203-207. 
Buffaloes, agility of, 135-136, 

Attachment to one locality, 140- 

146. 
Battles between males, 131-132. 
Bulls, 129-132. 

Butchering of, by Indians, de- 
scribed, 157-159. 
Calves, 132-135, 146-147. 
Color of, 126-128, 132-133. 
Cross-breeding of, 147-150. 
Description, 165. 
Domestication, 147-150. 
Extermination of, 111-119. 
Habits, 129-130. 
Hair, 165. 
Height, 165. 



Buffaloes \j:ontinued'\ — 

Herds of, 117, 161-163. 

Hides, 130-131. 

Horns, 165. 

Indians hold sacred, 127-129. 

Methods of hunting, 150-156. 

Migrations, 137-142. 

Panics among, 136-137. 

Range, 1 19-126, 165. 

Rubbing-stones, 131, 163. 

Rutting season, 131-132. 

Superstitions concerning, 127- 
130. 

" Surround " method of hunting, 
150-156. 

Trails, 138. 

Weight, 165. 

Young, 132-135, 146-147. 

See Bison. 
Buffalo-running, 159-161. 

California, absence of white goat 

from, 244-245. 
California mountain sheep \_Ovis 

canadensis ne/soni], 223, 

226. 
Calves, buffalo, 132-133, 146-147. 

Of musk-oxen, 100, 103, 132-133. 
Camping in Barren Grounds, 64- 

69. 
Canoes, musk-ox hunting in, 61-62. 
Cape Bryant, musk-oxen killed at, 

93- 
Capote, caribou-skin, 55. 
Capra americana, white goat called, 

259- 

Capra montana, 259. 

Caribou, course of migration, in Bar- 
ren Grounds, 44, 47-48. 

Cervus canadensis [Elk], 120. 

Chamois, relation of white goat to, 
232. 

Charging, false reputation of musk- 
oxen for, 73-75. 



Index 



279 



Cheyenne Indians, white buffalo skins 
dedicated to Sun by, 127, 

Coffee a luxury in the North, 50. 

Cogmolik Indians, 92. 

Colorado, buffalo-horns from, 166. 

Colorado Cafion, mountain sheep in, 
247. 

Copenhagen, live musk-ox in, 105. 

Corsica, the moufflon of, 182. 

Coues, Dr. EUiott, 256. 

Dakota, disappearance of mountain 
sheep from, 178-179. 

Deer-hunting on horses, 197. 

District of Columbia, buffaloes re- 
ported as once found in, 
120-121. 

Dodge, Colonel, 115, 133, 161. 

Dogs, question of shipping, into the 
Barren Grounds, 41-42. 
Scarcity of, in North Country, 

38-39- 
See Sledge-dogs. 

Domestication of buffaloes, 147-150. 

Drought, buffaloes driven from Mis- 
sissippi by, 121. 

Dufifel, the, defined, 39. 

Duke of Bedford, live musk-ox 
owned by, 103. 

Dunbar, William, 257, 259. 

Dung of musk-ox, 100. 

Earl of Lonsdale, musk-ox horns 
owned by, 99-100. 

Elk [ Cervus canadensis] , 1 20, 

Slaughter of, at Jackson's Hole, 
Ky., 273. 

Elk-hunting on horses, 197. 

Equipment for Barren Ground expe- 
dition, 53-54. 

Europe, fossil remains of musk-oxen 
found in, 85. 
Specimens (live) of musk-ox in, 
103. 



Ewe and lamb, Wister's experience 
with, 210-222. 

Feeding, problem of, in Barren 
Grounds, 41-42. 

Firth, John, 91. 

Flesh of musk-oxen, 100-103. 

Flowers in the Barren Grounds, 62. 

Fort Resolution, 39, 50, 

Fossil remains of musk-oxen, 85. 

Franz Josef Land, musk-oxen un- 
known in, 93. 

Fremont, J. C, on western range of 
buffaloes, 125. 

Fur, color of, of musk-oxen, 80, 
104. 

Gass, 175, 179, 256. 

Gaudet, Hudson's Bay Company post 

factor, 53. 
Goat, relation between sheep and, 

182. See White goat. 
Grease, craving for, in the North, 47. 
Great Lakes northern boundary of 

buffalo range, 121. 
Greenland, musk-oxen in, 51, 79-80, 

85. 
Green River, buffaloes found on 

tributaries of, 125. 
Grinnell Land, fossil remains of 

musk-oxen in, 85. 
Musk-oxen of, 79-80. 

Haggerty, Captain, 90. 

Hair of white goat, 239, 240-241, 

257- 

Haplocerus montanus [Rocky Moun- 
tain goat], 231, 259, 274. 
See White goat. 

Harlan's musk-ox \_Ovibos bombi- 
frons\ 76, 85. 

Headgear in Barren Ground hunt- 
ing. 33-34- 

Heads of musk-oxen, 99-100. 



28o 



Index 



Henry, Alexander, Journal of, Ii8, 

161-162. 
Hides, of buffaloes, 130-131. 

White goat, 241, 
Hodgson, Mr., Hudson's Bay Com- 
pany trader, 91. 
Hoofs of white goat, 239-240. 
Hornaday, W. T., 120-121, 148, 165. 
Horns, of mountain sheep, 181 ti. 

Musk-oxen's, 76, 98-100, 

Rings on rams', 208 n. 

White goat's, 239. 
Horses, antelope-hunting on, 197. 

Buffalo-hunting on, 153-155. 

Deer-hunting on, 197. 

Sheep-hunting on, 192-193. 
Hostility between sheep and goat, 

233-237. 245-246. 
Hudson's Bay Company posts, 37. 
Hunter, Dr., 257, 259. 
Hunting seasons in Barren Grounds, 
44-48, 50-52. 

Idaho, white goat in, 247, 250. 
India, sheep found in, 182. 
Indians, Alaskan, 90, 91, 92. 

For Barren Ground hunting, 52- 

53- 

Buffaloes formerly sacred to, 127. 

Methods of, in hunting musk- 
oxen, 47-49. 

Slaughter of buffalo by, 157-159. 
Innuits, musk-ox hunting by, 60-61. 

Jackson's Hole, elk-killing at, 273. 

Jones, C. J., experiments in breeding 

buffalo by, 148. 

Kamchatka, sheep found in, 182. 
Kentucky, buffaloes formerly in, 122. 
Domestication of buffaloes in, 

147. 
Skull of musk-ox found in, 85. 
Kids of white goat, 271. 



Knife for musk-ox hunting, 67. 
Kodak, hunting with a, 261. 
Kogmolik Indians, 92. 
Kookpugmioot Indians, 92. 

Lambs of mountain sheep, 208-222. 
"Land of Little Sticks," 17, 36. 
Laramie Plains, buffaloes on the, 

124, 125. 
Lewis, Meriwether, 175-176, 245, 

255-257- 
Confusion of goat and sheep by, 

251, 255-260. 
Livingston, Mont., mountain sheep 

seen at, 1 71-173, 183-184. 
London, live musk-ox in, 103. 
Loucheaux Indians, 91. 
Lydekker, Professor R., 75, 79. 
"The Royal Natural History" 

of, 246. 

Mackenzie River, musk-oxen not 
found west of, 86-93. 

Maclaine of Lochbuie, the, horns 
of sheep owned by, 224. 

Maps, mistakes in, 244-245. 

Mazama Sericea, white goat named, 
259. 

Mexico, mountain sheep in, 181 «., 
247. 

Migrations, buffalo, 137-142. 

Caribou, in Barren Grounds, 44, 
47-48. 

Mississippi, buffaloes formerly in, 
121. 

" Missouri River Journal," Audu- 
bon's, quoted, 157-159. 

Moccasins essential in Barren Ground 
outfit, 39. 

Montana, bison horns from, 166. 
Mountain sheep in, 225, 226. 
White goat in, 250, 275. 

Moore, Francis, "Voyage to 
Georgia" of, 121. 



Index 



281 



Moose \_Alces], 120. 
Mosquitoes in Barren Grounds, 44. 
Moufflon, the, of Corsica, 182. 
Mt. Evarts, sheep on, 273. 
Mountain bison, 126, 135-136. 
Mountain sheep [American bighorn, 
Ovis canadensis'], 171- 
226. 
Color, 179-180. 

Description, 179-183, 223-224. 
Distribution, 176, 224. 
Habitat, 199, 246-247. 
Height, 224. 
Hide, 179. 
Horns, 223-225. 
Hostility to goat, 233-237, 245- 

246. 
Keenness of sight, 219. 
Lambs, 208-222, 
Method of hunting, 197-199. 
Range, 176, 224. 
Rutting season, 184, 208. 
Species and subdivisions, 180- 

182. 
Weight, 224. 
White goat and, 233-237, 245- 

246. 
White variety \^Ovis dalW], i8r, 
201. 
Munn, Henry Toke, 47. 
Musk-ox of Barren Grounds [ Ovi- 
bos inoschatus~\, 17-106. 
Action when attacked, 59-60, 73- 

75- 
Appearance, 73. 
Calves, 100, 103, 130-131. 
Dung of, 100. 
Flesh, 100, 103. 
Fur, 97-98, 104-105. 
Genus, 75-80. 
Herds of, 97. 
Hides not valuable, 52. 
Horns, 98-100, 104, 106. 
Inaccessibility of, 50. 



Musk-ox Xcontinued] — 

Method of hunting, 56-69. 

Origin (reputed), 70. 

Permit necessary for hunting, 51. 

Range, 76, 79-80, 85-94, 105. 

Size, 94, 105. 

Specimens (live), 103. 

National Park, Colorado, buffaloes 
in, 1 1 7-1 18. 5^f Yellow- 
stone Park. 

Noonitagmiott Indians, 90. 

North Platte River, buffaloes on 
tributaries of, 126. 

Olympic Range, white goat not 
found in, 250. 

Ord, George, 259. 

Oreamnus montanus [Rocky Moun- 
tain goat], 231, 259, 274. 

Oregon, absence of white goat from, 
250. 

Ovibos bomhifrons [Harlan's musk- 
ox], 76, 85. 

Ovibos moschatus [Barren Ground 
and Greenland type of 
musk-ox], 76, 80, 82, 83, 
104-105. 

Ovibos pearyi, 80. 

Ovibos wardi, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 
104-105, 106. 

Ovis canadensis [American big- 
horn], 1 80-181, 208, 223- 
224. See Mountain sheep. 

Ovis canadensis auduboni, 181. 

Ovis canadensis dalli [Alaskan big- 
horn], 176, 181 n., 223- 
224, 226, 246. 

Ovis canadensis nelsoni [Californian 
sheep], 223, 224. 

Ovis canadensis stonei, 223. 

Ovis canadensis typica [Rocky 
Mountain sheep], 223, 
259- 



282 



Index 



Ovis cervina, 1 8 1. 

Oi'is dalli, i8i, 201. 

Ovis fannini [Saddleback sheep], 

181-182, 213. 
Ovis mexicana, 181. 
Ovis montana, 259. 
Ovis nelsoni, 181, 187. 
Ovis stonei, 177, 181. 

Panics among buffaloes, 136-137. 

Pawnee Indians, buffalo skins sacred 
to, 127. 

Peary, Lieutenant, musk-ox captured 
by, 105. 
Musk-oxen killed by, 76-79, 93. 

Pemmican, from dried buffalo meat, 
156. 
Scarcity of, in the North, 49. 

Philadelphia, white goat in Zoologi- 
cal Gardens at, 231, 237- 
238. 

Piccolo, Padre, 250. 

Pike, Warburton, 47, 62, 74, 94. 
Musk-ox heads owned by, lOO. 

Pine, patches of, in Land of Little 
Sticks, 36. 

Platte River, buffaloes on tributaries 
of, 125-126. 

Prairie bison {^Bos bison typicus), 
165. 

Protection, government, of musk- 
oxen, 51. 

Provision question in musk-ox hunt- 
ing. 36-38- 

Pro\'isions in Barren Grounds, 62-63. 

Rae, J., Hudson's Bay Company 

factor, 99. 
Railroads, effect of, on buffaloes, 

113-116. 
Ram seen at Li^-ingston, Mont., 

171-173, 183-184. 
" Records of Big Game," R. Ward's, 

104, 165, 223-224, 274. 



Red Desert Country, buffaloes in, 
126. 

Red River, buffaloes on the, 162. 

Red River half-breeds, buffalo hunts 
of, 117, 154-155- 

Rings on rams' horns, 208 «. 

Robinson, John (" Uncle Jack Rob- 
inson "), 124. 

Rocky Mountain goat [Haplocerus 
ttiontanus or Oreamnus 
vionianus'], 231, 259, 274. 
See \Miite goat. 

Rocky Mountain sheep [^Ovis cana- 
densis iypica'], 223, 259. 

" Royal Natural History, The," Ly- 
dekker's, 246, 247. 

Rubbing-stones, buffaloes', 131, 163. 

Rupicapra americana, white goat 
termed, 259. 

Rutting season, buffaloes', 131-132. 
Mountain sheep's, 184, 208. 

Saddleback sheep \_Ovis fannini'], 

181-182, 213. 
Salt Lake Valley, buffaloes in, 124. 
Salvatierra, Padre de, 250. 
Saw Tooth Range, white goat in, 247. 
Schwatka, Frederick, 60, 61, 93. 
Serows, Rocky Mountain goat mem- 
ber of same group as, 274. 
Sheep. See Mountain sheep. 
Shoshone Indians, sheep-hunting on 

horses by, 193. 
Siberia, fossil remains of musk-oxen 

found in, 85. 
Skulls of musk-oxen, 75-76, 80, 82, 83. 
Slaughter of buffaloes in America, 

I14-119. 
Sledge, description of, in Barren 

Ground outfit, 40-41. 
Sledge-dogs, methods of harnessing, 

60-61. 
Scarcity of, in North, 38-39. 
Snowfall in Barren Grounds, 35. 



Index 



283 



Snows, effect on buffaloes, 124, 137. 

Snow-shoes, Barren Ground, 35. 

Spitzbergen, musk-oxen unknown 
in, 93. 

Stone, Andrew J., report as to west- 
ern range of musk-oxen, 

86-93- 
Stouch, Major G. W. H., 143, 
Stringer, Rev. I. O., 89, 90. 

Strouds, 53, 54. 

" Surround " method of hunting buf- 
falo, 150-153. 
Sweetwater River, buffaloes on, 1 26. 

Tail, lack of, in mountain sheep, 

182. 
Tea an essential in Barren Ground 

outfit, 39-40. 
Tennessee River southern boundary 

of buffalo range, 121. 
Tepee in Barren Ground outfit, 55, 

57. 64. 
Teton Range, sheep-hunting in, 209- 

222. 
Tibet, sheep found in, 182. 

White goat in, 239. 
Tobacco, necessity of, in Barren 

Ground outfit, 39-40. 
Tooyogmioot Indians, 90. 
Tracks made by white goat, 239-240. 
Travelling, methods of, in Barren 

Ground hunting, 62-63. 
Trees, absence of, from Barren 

Grounds, 35-36. 
"Tripping" snow-shoes, 35. 

Vaches (yackes sauvages), 120. 
Virginia, domestication of buffaloes 

in, 147. 
"Voyage to Georgia," Moore's, 121. 

Ward, Rowland, 79. 

"Records of Big Game" by, 
cited, 104, 165, 223, 274. 



Washakie Needle, mountain sheep 

on the, 186-196. 
Washington (state), white goat 

found in, 250. 
WTiite goat \_Oreamnus montaMus\, 
227-273. 
Color, 242-243, 274. 
Description, 239-242. 
Food, 249. 

Habitat, 231, 245-25 1. 
Hair, 257. 
Height, 274. 
Hide, 241. 
Horns, 258. 
Hostility to sheep, 233-237, 245- 

246. 
Immigration from Asia, 232-233, 

245-246. 
Kids, 271. 

Lewis's error about, 251, 255-260. 
Method of hunting, 260. 
Origin, 232-233. 
Relationship to chamois, 232. 
Sheep and, 233-237, 245-246. 
Size, 242. 
Species, 232, 259. 
Specimens (live), 231, 237-238. 
Track made by, 239-240. 
Various Latin names for, 259. 
Weight, 241, 274. 
Whitney, Casper, musk-ox head 

taken by, ico. 
Whitney, William C, live musk-ox 

bought by, 103. 
Wild cows, elk called, 120. 
Wood bison [_Bos bison athabasccE\, 

117, 123, 165. 
Wool of musk-ox, 97-98, 104-105. 
Wycliff, Robert, 147, 148, 149. 
Wyoming, bison horns from, 166. 
Mountain sheep in, 185, 225, 

226. 
White goat not found in, 245, 
248. 



284 



Index 



Yancey, John, 252. 
Yellowstone Park, bison horns from, 
1 66. 
Buffaloes in, 11 7- 118. 
Game in, 273. 
Yoke, breaking buffaloes to the, 149. 
Young, of buffaloes, 132-135, 146- 
147. 
Of mountain sheep, 208-222. 



Young \_continued'\ — 

Of musk-oxen, 100, 103. 
Of white goat, 271. 

Zoological gardens, musk-oxen in, 

103. 
Zoological Gardens, Philadelphia, 

white goat in, 231, 237- 

238. 



AMERICAN SPORTSMAN^S LIBRARY 

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"A distinctly valuable and authoritative contribution. . . . Will be 
found to contain interesting material and reliable information for the enthusi- 
astic fisherman, who would know how, when, and where to fish for these 
gamy denizens of our lakes and streams." 

— The Fishing Gazette. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 



AMERICAN SPORTSMAN'S LIBRARY 



The Water=fowl Family 

By Leonard C. Sanford, L. B. Bishop, and T. S. Van Dyke. 
Illustrated by L. A. FuERTES, A. B. Frost, and C. L. Bull. 
A^ow ready. Price ^2.00 net. 

Bass, Pike, Perch, and Pickerel 

By James A. Henshall, M.D. Illustrated by Martin Justice and 
others. Now ready. Price $2.00 net. 

Big Game Fishes of the United States 

By Charles F. Holder. Illustrated by Charles F. W. Mielatz 
and others. Now ready. Price $2.00 net. 

The Sporting Dog 

By Joseph A. Graham, with many illustrations. Now ready. Price 
$2.00 net. 

Musk=ox, Bison, Sheep, and Goat 

By Caspar Whitney, George Bird Grinnell, and Owen Wister. 
Illustrated by Carl Rungius and others. A^ow ready. Price 
$2.00 net. 

IN PREPARATION FOR EARLY ISSUE 

Guns, Ammunition, and Tackle 

By A. W. Money, W. E. Carlin, A. L. A. Himmelwright, and 
J. Harrington Keene. Illustrated. 

Photography for the Sportsman 
Naturalist 

By W. E. Carlin. Illustrated. 

Further volumes will include articles on The Bear Family; The 
Cougar, Wild Cat, Wolf, and Fox ; American Race Horse and Run- 
ning Horse ; Trotting and Pacing ; Riding and Driving ; Yachting, 
Small Boat Sailing, and Canoeing ; Baseball and Football ; Rowing, 
Track Athletics, and Swimming ; Lacrosse, Lawn Tennis, Wrestling, 
Racquets, Squash, and Court Tennis ; Skating, Hockey, Ice Yachting, 
Coasting, and Skate Sailing. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 






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